Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Instead of grim politics, how about yardwork and some cats?

I had a post all set with dark ruminations about the State of our Nation on it's 244th birthday.

But, y'know what? You've heard it all before. We're fucked, the Plague is running wild, 40% of the American public is fucking batshit crazy. Welcome to 2020, yeah, well, shit.

Instead, I went out front to work on a project we've been thinking about for years.

Our little house was built on spec in 1922. It was built cheap, and it shows; as my Bride says, "Our house has ugly bones." Everything in and around it was built to turn a quick buck, which means spending as little a possible on any- and everything.

That includes the concrete pavement.

The original plan included a walkway from the curb to the front steps, from there around the east side of the house and out into the back yard to where the original garage stood.

Well, the garage has long-since burned, the only remnants fragments of glass and charcoal we turn up in the back garden from time to time. A tiny portion of the path around the side of the house remains, out by the back door, but the bulk is gone, demolished when we had the east side deck built.

The front walk, though?

Still there.

Broken, overgrown, ugly, crude...like I said - this was cheap, gimcrack Twenties concrete flatwork.

Well, we're cowering under the barrage of COVID-19, and what better time for some home improvement projects?

So we went out front, cleared the grass turf that had overgrown the concrete fragments and pried them up...

..and stacked them in a pile with the object of breaking them into smaller fragments to make a 4- to 6-inch recycled rock, what in the soils biz we call "stabilization rock", the bulk material you through over soft soil to make a dense base on which to build.

And that's when the Little Cat showed up.

This critter's name is "Nine", because she lived in the #9 storage unit in some trailer park or something where she got sick and was generally neglected until the nice people at a Cat Rescue organization took her in. She's desperately shaky on her feet, is a fragile little thing, and is very sweet and affectionate. She also looooves to be outside, and we don't let her roam nearly enough for her liking, so when she can get out she frolics around like a nut.

And this was pure joy for the little nut; outdoors, with these awesome piles of soft dirt to roll and dig in. And so she did...

...until even more fun ambled along, in the form of the Big Cat, Drachma, the senior housecat; black, comfortable, lazy, and plump. He's a solidly outdoors-cat, possessing enough physical eptitude that the Small One lacks that makes us confident he can take care of himself outside.

Full of the wildness she draws from her outdoor adventures, the Small One hunkered down in defilade of the dirt mount and waited for her victim to wander into the kill zone.

He did...and she went Over the Top:

Baruk Catzâd! Catzâd ai-mênu! The startled Drachma responded with a satisfying tail-bottle and crouch, and Little One was a Force of Nature...

...until he realized that it was just the annoying little spaz he shared his house with. Upon which he studiously ignored her, and she found something else intensely interesting in the manner of embarrassed cats since Ancient Egypt.

With the cat skirmish concluded, we could go back to work.

Okay, well, after that we got back to work.

Got the first lift of stab rock in place and the alignment cleared in order to begin digging out towards the street.

So, as you can tell, even yardwork is More Fun With Cats.

These truths

I'll have a longer rumination on Happy Treason Day, but although I didn't really pay much attention to Benito's oration at Mt. Rushmore the other day, it sounds like it was a really juicy serving of red meat to the Base. "BLM is a commie conspiracy against Good White People (probably masterminded by antifa) and we're NEVER going to surrender on our love for Treason in Defense of Slavery!"

Kreegah, Tarzan. Fucking bundolo. It's a wonder that apes aren't the only ones who understand that shit. Yeah, well, racist goobers, so not a dime's worth of difference, but, still...

What makes this intriguing is that at my stage-struck daughter's request we streamed Hamilton last night (wonderfully luminous art, sketchy history...) and the contrast couldn't be sharper between the two visions of America.

Both include a huge helping of myth and fantasy.

But the one myth is hopeful, broad, innovative, expansive, inclusive...

and the other is narrow, angry, resentful, purblind, intolerant, and vicious.

We the People have a seismic-level event this November that will determine which of those myths we embrace.

I have NO confidence that We will chose the hopeful one.

And yet...the promise of this nation, the standard We set for ourselves, regardless of how often we failed to live up to it, is a truly aspirational one. If we were the nation we say we want to be, we would, indeed, be a shining city on a hill.

But more on this subject tomorrow. Until then, enjoy my favorite Hamilton guy, George the Third, tell us about his love and longing...

What the hell is your malfunction?

It is difficult to articulate the inchoate rage and impotent frustration I feel as I read and watch my nation throw itself headfirst into the fucking COVID minefield.

Largely because, as I explained early on in this pandemic, it didn't have to. We the People and our national government have dealt with these sorts of huge national emergencies before. We know how to deal with them in ways that minimize the danger to the general public while still accomplishing the mission.

Instead, largely because the federal government in this timeline is run by fucking grifters, fools, and rabid Randite ideologues, we've managed to screw the COVID pooch like the smallest dog in the dog pound to the point where we're going to kill tens and probably hundreds of thousands of us, uselessly, while still destroying the national wealth and further detonating the political commons.

And the most infuriating part about this is that those of us who are doing "the right thing"; masking, staying apart, reducing our contacts and being prudent...are completely helpless in the face of the remainder of our people who are just completely fucking useless.

It's like, and excuse me if I drag Acting 1SG Lawes into this, you're the topkick and you have been savagely on your outfit, forcing the joes to dig in deep, to emplace the overhead cover, to pull security while doing all that, aggressively patrolling and wiring and mining your defense. And then you look to the companies to your left and right and they're just standing around with their collective thumbs up their collective ass and their brains in neutral, lolling around like queens, and basically just begging the enemy to pound the shit out of them with artillery and run through them like a dose of salts.

Was it Caligula that said something about wishing that the world had just one neck, so he could choke the life out of it?

Not that looney Romans are particularly great role-models, but that's how I feel as I watch helplessly as numbnuts all around me, ranging from the Chief Executive to rando wingnut whackjobs, prance around maskless in public meeching about freedom and liberty and not living in fear.

Fear, you stupid sonsofbitches? You're supposed to fear things like the enemy's artillery and getting overrun. They can fucking kill you.

That's why you dig in and interlock your fields of fire and lay out the wire. So you live through the next attack.

And any GI will tell you; it takes every GI doing all this stuff to make it work.

One company. One platoon dicking off, and the enemy is inside your perimeter grenading you in your holes and shooting you in the back.

And here we have entire states, and a huge portion of the entire nation, doing the equivalent of pouting because digging in deep is haaaaard and the wire cuts your fingers and, anyway, the enemy isn't really dangerous after all, right, so who needs to dig in and patrol and do all those nasty Army things, anyway? When we could be going to bars and beaches, amirite?

And there's not a damn thing I can do about that, and it's driving me up the fucking wall.

One neck, I swear.

WASF.

Thirteen Years

Thirteen years ago this coming July I started writing at this place. It appears that I promised to "...talk about politics, soccer and adoption.".

Well, I did that for goddamn sure. At the time, of course, we were in the middle of what was the then-tortuous process of international adoption, so that was a huge part of our lives. Now? Well, there's this salty Asian kid who for some reason lives in our house and leaves her shit lying around everywhere while she pursues her fascination with art and butterfly ranching and polaroid pictures. She's not "adoption", she's just our kid, whose connection to "adoption" is reduced to stuff like giving us a hard time for not forcing her to take Mandarin classes whilst skipping blithely over the fact that she was a total butt-pain when we tried back in the day.

She's a sweetie and I love her dearly, but she's also become a paranoid goober about my posting her picture here (as if any of you, assuming anyone actually READS this stuff which I'm inclined to doubt given the stats Facebook shows me, give's a rat's ass) so you're just gonna have to imagine what she looks like today.

Soccer? Not anymore. I've got a whole 'nother crib where I talk about the Beautiful Game.

Funny story about that, actually.

Back in...oh, some time around 2014 or so, I think, I ran into a guy who ran a little soccer site called Slide Rule Pass. It's gone, sadly, because The Internet, but back in the day is was one of the more thoughtful and incisive Portland soccer sites. I went on as a commentor, got into some give-and-take with the blog owner, and tl:dr ended up writing about the Thorns, the women's professional team here in Portland. Another long-time follower and commentor came on board to write about the men's team, the Timbers, and off we went.

A couple of years later - in late 2017 - along comes the guy who was the then-editor of the "big" Portland soccer site, Stumptown Footy, who poaches us away to do the same thing for his site we were doing for SRP. The original Slide Rule owner is busy downstate, loses interest, stops paying the hosting fee, and the site just dies.

So I end up writing a column called "Thorns FC" for Stumptown for the 2018 season while my compa writes "Six Degrees" - it's a fun column and it's still going. Here's a link to him, in case you're interested. Whatever.

Anyway, I do my thing, the same thing I've been doing all along; analyzing teams, tactics, and results, discussing what I think is working and what isn't. I call my shots, and this doesn't impress a lot of the club's officials or some players, and I don't really give a shit about the "newsy" stuff; I'd rather write a deep dive into league goalkeeping metrics or comparing the play of the Thorns' midfielders.

And this, apparently, isn't what the Stumptown editor wants (despite 1) me doing the same thing I've been doing all along when he hoovered me away from Slide Rule Pass, and 2) my having warned him that I wasn't going to change, and not changing). After the end of the 2018 season, I have the dubious distinction of getting canned from a non-paying hobby gig, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

So I took my soccer ball and went...well, not home, but to another website, where I do the same irritating things only for myself rather than for SB Nation.

At least I'm still doing politics. Well...sorta.

The problem with "politics" as it currently exists in the United States is that they are effectively stymied.

"Politics" is, as bottom, simply the civic discussion about how goods and services are distributed. Who gets what, how much, and how that happens. In a rational polity that process is a sort of give-and-take, with the various factions agreeing, disputing, or (often) fighting over those questions. There's typically a "liberal" or "left" side that wants more distribution of a greater share of private wealth for public goods (meaning a more "level" society with more collective activity), and a "conservative" side that wants less of both, that is, less confiscation and distribution of private wealth (meaning more concentration of wealth, a more hierarchical society, and less collective actions).

But the "conservative" side of the U.S. public is no longer a "conservative party". It's a nonsensical cult addicted to magical thinking like "trickle-down economics" and "taxes are theft" that have been proved ridiculous any and every time they are actually attempted, as well as a lunatic cult of individuality that is perhaps best embodied in the utterly mad insistence on the Right of foregoing protective masks in the face of a lethal respiratory pandemic.

There's no discussing or arguing for or against that nonsense. There is nothing I can do, or say, that will ameliorate that sort of idiocy. The American "Right" is utterly lost, they are impervious to reason and discourse, they are obviously, openly, loudly out-and-proud looney cultists. You can see that as well as I can, nothing I can say will change that, and nothing I can say will help. They're just fucking nuts, and repeating "Jesus wept, they're just fucking nuts!" is the ultimate in wasting breath.

So I'm not really bothering anymore, other than the occasional snark at the idiocy-of-the-day, like the whole "Blue Lives Matter" bullshit I talked about the other morning.

What else..?

I'm still picking my way slowly through military history though I've largely run out of events that intrigue me. I'm thinking of adding one final entry to the "Imperial Japanese Army - What Went Wrong" series this August with a short diversion on "August Storm", the Soviet offensive through Manchuria in 1945, but beyond that...hmmm. Any other suggestions?

I try and keep this from being a daddy blog, so I don't see doing more family stuff, despite the brutal reality that I'm turning out to be a Suburban Dad. Yesterday, "Father's Day"? Moved the lawn. Cooked hamburgers on the grill while sipping a beer.

Christ, I'm a meme.

Portland and Oregon are great places, so possibly I'll keep posting about my Northwest home. One of the saddest parts of the Plague Year is not being able to get out and about the way I used to.

So that's kind of where this place has gone as an early teenager. At least I'm here and it's still here; long-form blogging is going the way of cuneiform, but I'm going to try and make it run as long as I can.

Any suggestions for subject matter, though..?

Oh, wait...

Cats!

Fort Loser

This is me in 1984, a perky young SP-4 waiting patiently for someone to auger into Sicily Drop Zone at Fort Braxton Bragg, North Carolina.

At the time I couldn't have picked Braxton Bragg out of a police lineup or told you what the hell he'd done to get a ginormous Army post named after him. But, then I was young and stupid, as young men often are.

Know I know better.

And now ol' Braxton is in the middle of a ginormous shitstorm revolving around the way my country spent a long time treating - and in a lot of ways still treats - those of Us the People a whole bunch of the rest of We figured were more useful as property than actual people.

And, of course, if there's a shitstorm there's a Trump stepping in (and stirring up) the shit:

I'm not going to even bother making an argument about this. The nonsensical notion of naming places where American soldiers live and train for people who fought against and killed American soldiers would be so far beyond ridiculously stupid that it would create an entire dimension of "ridiculously stupid".

These names are a living monument to the racism that has poisoned the nation for so long that they simply need to be cornered as quickly as possible and beaten to death with the dispatch you'd club a cannibal plague rat.

Plus there's a whole bunch of GIs who have already made the argument and more eloquently than I ever could.

So, nope, my point here today is just to recall that not only were these sonsofbitches traitors, not only were they murderous traitors, not only were they murderous traitors for one of the worst possible fucking causes in human history but that, as officers and commanders of traitorous troops they were massive fucking losers, and that there was no bigger loser in the bunch than Braxton Fucking Bragg.

Let me give you a quick taste (and a nasty flavor it is) of the man, from his Wikipedia article:

"In June 1862, Bragg was elevated to command the Army of Mississippi (later known as the Army of Tennessee). He and Edmund Kirby Smith attempted an invasion of Kentucky in 1862, but Bragg retreated following the inconclusive Battle of Perryville in October.

In December, he fought another inconclusive battle at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Battle of Stones River, against the Army of the Cumberland under Major General William Rosecrans. After months without significant fighting, Bragg was outmaneuvered by Rosecrans in the Tullahoma Campaign in June 1863, causing him to surrender Middle Tennessee to the Union. Bragg retreated to Chattanooga but evacuated it in September as Rosecrans' troops entered Georgia.

Later that month, with the assistance of Confederate forces from the Eastern Theater under James Longstreet, Bragg was able to defeat Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga, the bloodiest battle in the Western Theater, and the only major Confederate victory therein. Bragg forced Rosecrans back to Tennessee, but was criticized for not mounting an effective pursuit. In November, Bragg's army was routed by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga and pushed back to Georgia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis subsequently relieved Bragg of command, recalling him to Richmond to serve as his chief military advisor. Bragg briefly returned to the field as a corps commander near the end of the war during the Campaign of the Carolinas.

Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles in which he engaged ended in defeats. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the men and the officers of his command, who criticized him for numerous perceived faults, including poor battlefield strategy, a quick temper, and overzealous discipline. Bragg has a generally poor reputation with historians, while some point towards the failures of Bragg's subordinates, especially Leonidas Polk, a close ally of Davis and known enemy of Bragg, as more significant factors in the many Confederate defeats at which Bragg commanded. The losses which Bragg suffered are cited as principal factors in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy."

So, in the course of about two years, this idiot:

1. Tried to invade Kentucky, couldn't whip Don Carlos Buell (who was a pretty conclusive nitwit himself), and ran away like a whipped dog,
2. Couldn't beat fucking Bill Rosecrans, who as a commander couldn't beat a carpet if you spotted him the bat and the carpet,
3. Then got outmaneuvered by Rosecrans, which is like winning some sort of Nobel Prize for "crap generaling",
4. Finally whipped Rosecrans in a bloody brawl but needed Longstreet, one of the best rebel officers to do it,
5. And when the U.S. finally 86ed Rosecrans and replaced him with a competent commander Bragg managed to get his ass comprehensively whipped despite fighting defensively in one of the strongest defensive positions ever held by an armed force in the history of combat (look up the "Battle of Missionary Ridge" sometime...).

Finally even Jeff Davis - not exactly a military genius - had enough of Bragg's incompetent ass and got him out of the chain of command.

This guy was a complete and utter military moron.

Taking his name off the Home of the Airborne wouldn't just be a recognition that We the People shouldn't "honor" people who betrayed our country for the notion that other people could and should be owned like a box of Cap'n Crunch.

It's be a recognition that this particular traitor was not just a traitor but a spectacularly incompetent one, at that.

Then rename the place for George Thomas, who said this:

"[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed.

This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them."

Now that would be a perfect, chef's kiss, sort way of correcting the history books. Fort George Thomas.

Do it.

Now.