The Ride: Part Three

 We all stood real quiet, nobody wanting to go on this adventure, but no one wanting to dispute Furlow. We looked at our feet, then at one another. Nobody chose to look at Furlow. The silence didn’t dampen his resolve, though. He just looked at us shook his head. Across the wooden fence, the young bull calf looked at us, and I’ll swear he had a grin on his face.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Furlow said. “We’ll herd him into that chute and then I’ll tie this rope around him like us cowboys do.” He made a motion describing the action in case we couldn’t understand words. “Then,” he said, “I’ll get on and ya’ll will let him out.” He smiled. “I’ll show him who’s boss.”

Before we could act, he climbed over the fence and was in the pen with the calf, who had quit smiling.

I don’t know who moved first, maybe it was T-Boy. He always stood up for his race. I saw him one time beat Teddy Ratliff over half the county for calling him a, well I won’t say what he called him but it got Teddy’s rear end kicked over half the county. I’m pretty sure he followed Furlow first so as to plant a flag for bravery. Anyway, first thing you know, we were all in the pen and closing in on the calf, who looked for one second like he was going to charge us and the next like he was going to break the fence down and run. He chose and just stood there waiting.

The chute Furlow mentioned ran near the side of the barn at the far end of the pen. Mister General Lee had fixed two wide boards at the far end so that if you ran a cow or calf down the chute and it stuck its head between the two boards you could pull the one that pivoted with an attached rope and catch the creature’s head so you could give it a worm pill or whatever. The outside of the chute at that point consisted of a gate that could be swung open and, after the cow’s head was released, you could let it out into the pen.

Are you beginning to get picture?

Good. It didn’t us long to herd the bull calf into the chute and down to its end. He didn’t resist much. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying it. Furlow had climbed up and had one foot on each side of the chute when the calf reached the end.

“Now pass that rope through,” he said to the  two on either side of the chute and direct them to handle the ends as he drew them up and drew them up so he could hold them in one hand like you’ve seen the cowboys do. He lowered himself down until he settled down on the calf’s back in a rider’s position and pulled the ends of the rope together and held them tight in his right hand. He relaxed, took a breath, and motioned, just like a real rodeo star, for Boogy to open the gate.

Some say he made two bounds. Some say three, but it sure wasn’t more than that before the calf’s butt went straight up the air and Furlow went horizontal over where the calf’s head had been a second before but which had led a sharp turn that allowed Furlow’s body to land in a vacant spot two feet away and bounce before it settled into a dusty heap. We all ran over.

We were happy to see Furlow lift himself up chest first and bounce to his feet. “Was that a full eight seconds? he asked. Nobody spoke. “I don’t think I quite made it, he said. He looked at the calf who was standing ten feet away with the biggest smirk on his face you ever saw.

We all looked at one another, glad for the adventure to be over and for Furlow still standing. “That was some ride,” someone said.

Run that sonofabitch back in there,” Furlow said. “And somebody get that other piece of  rope.”

Next week: Conclusion, or how much damage can one person on a crazy bull calf do.

Dark Waters

While rational people in America breath a sigh of relief, I’m struggling with this uneasy feeling. I fear that the next week may be the most dangerous for this country since the first half of April, 1861. We have a huge number of elected officials of the Trump Party, including three from our state, who have decided to abandon the oath they took to protect the Constitution of the United States of America and follow the whims of their leader. In past times, we would have considered this the bottom. I fear, though, that there is no bottom for the followers of this deluded megalomaniac. There is always a next step lower for this man. Will, “Boys get your guns,” be next? Four things give me hope, on an otherwise cloud-foreboding day.

1.     The “boys” he would be talking to are a group of overweight, marginally functional, cowardly, irresponsible nitwits who would end up shooting one another more frequently than they would others.

2.     We have a military composed of fine women and men who took the same oath I did and still, as I do, honor it. It is much easier to abandon that oath as a politician without scruples than as a warrior whose comrades, as well as their country, depend on shared honor and the duty for which it calls. They are there to protect us.

3.     There is what I call “The Thomas Beckett Syndrome” in which people, like Saul on the road to Damascus, or John Newton on the decks of a slave ship, turn from evil and embrace a better life.

4.     I don’t think the political party of Winthrop Rockefeller, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Theodore Roosevelt will continue to sink into this mire.

If I have given offense, I can’t apologize. It’s that oath I mentioned. One can’t take an oath to protect his country and then forebear standing up to those who have either never taken the oath, and thus disparage it, or, worse, have taken and abandoned it. If we disagree on the facts of governing a country, you are still my brothers and sisters. I still love you. We can talk. I’m just asking that we stop this dangerous foolishness. We can save our country if we hold fast.

Equity

 Sundays I think of the Galilean, not from religious fervor, but because I was trained to do so as a youth and things stick. Lately, I’ve been concerned, since I don’t have to worry constantly about paying bills, with the theoretical aspects of urban planning. Now what would He (with a capital “h”) have to say about urban planning? I don’t know.

He did say, we are told, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” According to another source, he just said, "Blessed are the poor." I sort of like the first since I've know some pretty rich people who were awfully poor in spirit, even people who have buildings named after them.

This hit home to me a number of years ago while working on a project involving a working-class neighborhood in decline. I had attended a workshop by the then current “guru of planning” who had assured the crowd that the type planning pioneered by him and his wife would cure everything from ugly neighborhoods to socio-economic inequity to the “low-down blues.” He was an engaging speaker, much in demand, and charismatic. He enthralled the crowd with his speech and all the slides, pictures, and pronouncements.

I was still hyped when an activist introduced me to a woman who lived in the neighborhood in question. She was talkative. That encouraged me. I just had to ask her about interaction with her neighbors. (The guru had assured us that was a sign of the righteousness of his planning model).

She turned stone cold when I asked. “Mr.,” she said, “I’m a single-mother of two boys whose father ran off with another woman and doesn’t provide a penny for support. I hold down two jobs so I can feed them and provide a place to live. When I’m at my second job, I lock my boys in the house so they don’t get killed by stray bullets. I don’t know who my neighbors are and, quite frankly, don’t care.”

Since then, I’ve not been so sure that streetscapes, bike paths, and inspired urban design are the answers to what our cities face.

Myths: The Danger

Up early and have some time on my hands. I’m thinking about myths. I’m not thinking of myths in the sense of the late Joseph Campbell who sequestered himself in Woodstock, NY for five years while he read about them.

 I’m thinking of myths in terms of why so many people are willing to believe in them despite physical and empirical contradictions.  It may determine the future of America, maybe even the planet.

 What purpose do they serve? Perhaps they allow control. Yuval Noah Harari. an Israeli public intellectual, historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks so. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he posits that while direct contact only allows an individual or group to control a small number of people, myths allow that control to spread to unknown limits.

 During my lifetime are vivid examples. Consider the fact that on November 22, 1963, a deranged former Marine and immigrant to Communist Russia, remained for lunch at his job in a high-rise depository in downtown Dallas, and with a rifle snuck in as “window shades” needing repair fired at a motorcade killing President John F. Kennedy.

 Today in America, there are college-educated adult Americans walking about us who don’t believe, despite contemporary—repeat contemporary—eye-witnesses and a preponderance of evidence, that it never happened. Oh, it happened all right, they admit. Only a few join the 32 percent of their colleagues who believe that Elvis is still alive and place the former president alive on a South Sea island. No, they believe, without a shred of reliable evidence and using ludicrous claims, (20 year-old repressed memories coming to the surface and such) that a coalition of city, county, state, CIA, FBI, U.S. military, mafia lords, and Cuban leaders led by then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, carried off the greatest conspiracy in American history for specious reasons and were so powerful that no deathbed confession has ever disclosed its existence. Oh, and some believe that the coalition carefully and specifically chose and employed Lee Harvey Oswald to carry out the mission. It would have been an odd choice at best.

 Now consider a real conspiracy, say the one, by the Ronald Reagan administration to illegally sell weapons to Iran for money with which illegally to fund our side of a foreign war in South America. That real conspiracy, involving probably no one outside the administration, unfolded in a matter of months, not years.

 Results of mythology in America? Well hell, read today’s legitimate press.

The End

 My military career ended on November 11, 1970. I had started the four-year experience a bitter, hostile, unwilling participant. Why four years and no accepting the draft? They were sending Army draftees to Vietnam. Besides, if I had to go, there was no choice but he U.S. Navy. When I was fifteen years old, a cousin came home from the Navy and, oh, the stories he could tell. Gunnels awash! I spent that year collecting all the info I could, just waiting for the day I turned old enough to enlist.

 Time past, my fervor for the military dwindled, but not my sense that sailors were just a step above and the sea as a siren still called. Why enlist? Found out to my dismay that I couldn’t pass some of the color blindness tests. The Navy didn’t take too willingly to line officers that couldn’t distinguish some shades of red. Oh, and that Vietnam thing? I learned not to piss the Navy off. They had ways.

 Anyway, I ended in a much better frame of mind, having decided along the way that I could change my attitude much easier than I could change my circumstances. So, I spent the night of the 11^th in a cheap motel in Starkville Mississippi with an old Gibson guitar and a commendation from my Fleet Admiral, daring the future to meet me on my own terms. All my belongings in the world fit in a 1967 Chevy Impala. I was ready.

 It’s been a roller-coaster ride since, mostly ups. I’m somewhere between a mediocre fish in a large pond and a second-tier fish in a small pond. I’ve seen lots, but I never thought I’d see a United States of America in the condition that I, personally, feel it is in today. We have a leader of a party that has deeply dishonored two of my Navy’s best, John Kerry and John McCain. We have a leader of a party that has branded all my brother and sister veterans as “suckers and losers.” Because of my personal experience, I was a bit used to it, but the young ones who have come after didn’t deserve it.

 I have seen the leader of a party mock a disabled person, an act that hit close to home. I have seen a level of discourse sink to depths that would have embarrassed some of my fellow Bosun’s Mates. I have seen us turned against voice of reason, then decency, then one another. I have seen the statue’s torch grow dim, evil called to readiness, and the “madding crowd” inflamed with lies and chants. I wonder if I dare to call a friend.

 I think the low point came early in this administration when the leader of the party addressed a group of police officers. I have, do, and will support the vast majority of fine men and women who serve as public safety members of government, both the police officers and fire fighters. They do the jobs that we are afraid to do and then hang crucified for actions of a few. These include actions that are misguided to say the least, but easy to condemn by those who have never ridden the mean streets of America at midnight or sat in terror expecting the unexpected.

 I have lost friends over my support for the police officers and former police officers I have known.

 But when the President of the United States told an assembled group of officers “not to be so gentle with suspects,” i.e. those who are presumed innocent until proven guilty, told them it would be okay to bang their heads against a car door opening, it made me nauseated. When the group, in their blue uniforms and dainty white gloves laughed and clapped, I felt a sadness overcome me like a cloud of the stinging grief. I’m sure they were hand picked for the occasion and they weren’t the fine men and women I’ve known. Still, it broke my heart.

 That’s what the current leader of our county has done for me. I want everyone to vote. I want everyone to vote for the candidate they believe will bring dignity to this country that I and so many others have served. I will abide the outcome. It may, as some of the more divisive stickers suggest, make me cry, but I won’t cry for myself. I’ll cry for those who are still young enough that they will have to live with bad choices.

 For me, I’ll survive. I won’t say that I’ve survived worse, since I wasn’t around for the Civil War, the two World Wars, or the Great Depression. I have faith in my ability to function. As they used to say in one of my previous lifetimes, “It ain’t no bigee.”

Primal Fear

Fear is an odd thing. Webster defines it as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” The genetic condition of fear must have been helpful to our ancestors who lived on the Savanah alongside predatory creatures. I remember it from dark nights in a foreign land.

American neurologist and physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon added, in the early 1900s, a condition known as “flight or fight response.” It describes a response to an acute threat to survival that is marked by physical changes, including nervous and endocrine changes. It may prepare a human or an animal to react or to retreat.” This one I remember well from an encounter on a winter’s night with a stranger who stopped me on a city street and placed a hand inside his coat. To my relief he produced a note with an address, and asked directions.

The most fascinating member of the family of fears, to me, is called “primal fear.’ This is the highest level of fear that most people do not experience, usually related to the feeling of impending doom. Anyone raised in a rural protestant church knows this as evidenced by the lifelong and unshakeable terror that their precious body may burn in an everlasting fire for eternity upon their death. I personally consider this as a form of child abuse but will save that thought for another day.

Today, it is the “Gotterdammerung” facing the country I love and have tried to serve faithfully during my adult life that darkens my hope. I see it now as a great ship headed directly into an iceberg as friendly passengers dance around me. It is my tragic and primal fear that we may lose America as we know it in two more days.

How did this happen? Better minds than mine wrestle this question daily. Unbelievably to me, the country may re-elect a man whom I believe, based on my upbringing, education, experience, and reflection, to be the most evil and degenerate president in American history.

The question is not how nearly one-half of Americans support what may occur. Over half of that percentage contains the group of Americans, almost a reliable percentage, who believed Elvis was alive 20 years after his death and that professional wrestling is conducted under strict rules. This segment contains the ones who would be dead today if it were not for the Affordable Care Act pushed through by an African-American president. (Not the term they use.) This segment is largely immune to reason or factual data.

Of the remaining 20 percent of Americans are the “single-issue voters” who would vote for Charles Manson, brought from the dead, for president if he promised to make abortion illegal, allow citizens to use bazookas to settle arguments, or banished anyone to whom nature had provided a different genetic makeup. They may be educated but have used their education merely to sharpen their weapons of bigotry.

We can shave off another ten percent of those who believe that unlimited wealth and no restrictions placed on how to obtain it will produce a perfect society. This society would be, one must suppose, much like, the American South of the 1850s. Some use their education to create false doctrines supporting this goal.

Then there is a layer of supporters who somehow believe their profession is best protected by a liar and false prophet. Some are educated and some are not. All reject any internal logic that doesn’t support their need for self-preservation. They are loyal to a man who thinks loyalty is a one-way trait.

That leaves the remaining sliver of supporters who augment the primal fear that haunts my sole and interrupts my sleep. These include many old friends who are educated, some highly so. They don’t carry any apparent burdens that would tarnish their thoughts. In a crowd they would appear normal. Individually, they appear fully capable of critical thinking, until the subject of politics emerges. What logic have they neglected?

Some may have even read William Shirer’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Some, I know, have seen the film Schindler’s List.

A few may have read It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

A few have attended the Holocaust Museum in our nation’s capitol.

Some attend church and worship the man who told us to love another and not to judge.

Some have read The Grapes of Wrath. I know this for they attended college.

Almost all know the words to This Land is Your Land.

In short, and in conclusion, these friends matured under the same conditions as I but have developed diametrically opposed beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong. I may be guilty of illogic. They might be.

That’s what scares the living hell out of me.

Fear

 These words stand before you written by a man who is far from perfect. On my decent side, I love reading, studying ideas, from science to history to woodworking. On the negative, I’m “not eaten up” as my Sainted Mother would say, with the desire to do manual labor. I’m prone to be mercurial at times. A close friend once said that I “don’t have 24-hour a day attitude about anything." I’m a bit selfish and known, I think, as a nice person except when I’m not.

 I do have a consistent attitude about some things. I eschew, for example, blind bigotry and prejudice aimed at those who don’t deserve it. This includes people of color, people whose genes have produced different sexual makeups, women in power, and immigrants fleeing death and persecution. I abhor violence toward others, crime, deceit, physical and mental abuse, disrespect for the physically challenged, gratuitous lying, the use of inherited wealth (really any wealth but particularly the “lucky sperm” kind) to mistreat or take advantage of others.

 I’m ambivalent about most religions but hostile to any that espouses hatred, violence, or bigotry. I’m very suspicious (a condition taught me by aforementioned Sainted Mother) of religious fanatics and hypocrites. I especially steer clear of those who use religion for financial or political reasons.

 I’ve paid taxes each year since 1961, served my country for four years, one in a war zone, and have managed to convince a remarkable woman to keep me for over 48 years. The only financial handouts I’ve received were via the G.I. Bill and my portion of stock values of companies that are heavily subsidized by local, state, and federal taxes, (which is almost all of them).

 A typical 2020 version of J. Alfred Prufrock you say? I’ll accept that. But just imagine, only imagine, the shock I’ve felt during the last four years as I’ve learned that close friends, some of whom I’ve used as role models, have succumbed to the trumpet call of a group ruled by a man whose every action stands in direct opposition to everything I love and respect, who preaches and supports all the elements of life and history that scare me into a primal fear and dread of living. Now, it seems

 Bad is good,

Good is bad,

Beauty is ugly,

Ugly is beautiful,

Facts are stupid things.

The U.S. Constitution sucks.

Greed is the highest order of things,

Altruism is for fools and liberal fantasizers,

Science is a foolish fantasy of progressives, and

The function of politics is to make your enemies weep.

 I weep, but not for myself. I’m old and everything I write is “from a warm room on a full stomach.”

 I weep for the grandchildren of my friends and pray, “to whatever gods may be," that they are never born poor or different.

Answers

 

Sundown In Zion

CHAPTER fifty-one

            They all took Sunday off. Sheriff Love explained that they each enjoyed enough excitement on Saturday to last a lifetime. “Besides,” he said, “I have to take my wife to church on Sunday. We haven’t missed a service in over 47 years and we’re not going to start now.”

            Charlie was at Angela’s house. Nelson tried all that morning to reach Tina, but she didn’t answer her phone at home. He also tried her office with no luck. He read for an hour after breakfast and then fired up his computer to make notes for his report.

            The first thing that appeared on his screen was notice of an email from Tina. He clicked to it. It read.

            Forgive me, but please don’t try to contact me again. It is all over, through no fault of yours, only mine. I do not love you and will never love you. For better or worse, love is a one-time thing with me. Sex is a relief from the pain of loss, but only a temporary one. I thought perhaps you were different, but no. I loved the sex, but each time we finished, and you lay beside me, I was filled with disgust. Not only with you, but with myself mostly and with the thought of dishonoring the memory of my husband. See, I didn’t love him when we married. He represented an end to a student’s poverty and a little physical fun, that’s all. Then something strange happened as we faced life together and overcame its petty struggles. I woke up one morning and realized that I worshipped the ground on which he walked. Every time I took a breath, that feeling grew stronger. May you share it someday. Being loved can generate love, that’s not from a sociologist, but from a life’s partner of a wonderful person. When we meet on campus, let’s meet as friends. You can even take my class if you wish. Friends, that’s all. I need all of them I can find. Take care.

Tina

Nelson closed the email. He spent the afternoon making notes of his remembrances, and the evening thinking, with a glass of Jack Daniels close by.

The next morning, he walked into the sheriff’s office to find him in an expansive mood. “Come in my nautical friend. Get some coffee and sit. When they both had settled comfortably, he said, “Know what our preacher preached on yesterday?”

Nelson shook his head.

“Handling life’s surprises with the help of God,” he said. “Now ain’t that a fucking hoot? What you want to know about first?”? He stopped and spoke loudly toward the door. “Mrs. M, you’ll know all about everything when you type my report. Right now, you’ll just have to wait.” There was a familiar scuffling sound from the other side of the door. He waited.

“Now,” he said. “You’ll first want to know about Brother Dale Underhill, as he is known, right?

Nelson nodded.

“When he figured the jig was up,” the sheriff said, “he started singing. Not hymns either but a sad and tragic story. Seems greed-envy overtook him the way inertia overtakes many of our county residents. He saw those TV evangelists with their private jets and mansions, and it gnawed on him like glory gnaws on people like us.” They both smiled. “Then he read a book about those fundamentalist Mormon men out west. He and Bully spent way too much time talking about it and they hatched a plan.”

“Let me guess,” Nelson said. “It involved the Ransom Center.”

“Bingo. He used some secret network that preachers have and found this huge market for brainwashed young starlets and the two of them sprang into action.”

“Brigette said they appraised her at fifty grand.”

“That’s a discounted price,” he said, “because she was so hardheaded and difficult to train. She’s also a little old. They like them no older than 14, as a rule. Anyway,” he said. “A few sales financed their entry into a more lucrative, although riskier, field. Greed overcame caution and here we are. He says they were quitting all of their businesses after Bridgette and that delivery we intercepted. You were making things too warm for them and they all had their nests made anyway. It was off to the Caribbean after that final load.”

“Speaking of that,” Nelson said, “how did Don Dillahunty fit in?

“Seems he came to Brother Dale complaining that his wives, both former and present, were bankrupting him and he didn’t know what to do.”

“And?”

“Just so happened that the meth-gang needed a way to smuggle hard-to-get ingredients in and Don imported a lot of furniture from the Vietnamese. They, the Vietnamese ain’t above stuffing such furniture creatively. Don ask why. They are still pissed off about the war, if you ask me. Anyway, as Brother Dale put it, in that charming way of his, ‘It was a marriage made in Heaven’ and the rest is history.”

Bridgette’s mother is happy?”

“Look up the word in the dictionary and you’ll see her picture there.”

“Will they keep Martin out of the news?”

“Now there is another shocking development. I trust you didn’t fail to see a little more than rescuer and rescuee attraction during our little get together?

“Who could have missed it? That explains the portion of the letter her mom found.”
“It explains a lot of things,” the sheriff said, “not the least of which is why they took her

from the Ransom Center when they didn’t really need kidnap money anymore. They stop short of murdering for miscegenation now, these assholes. Besides, they had a better treatment.”

            “What about the crime scene?”

“They went yesterday and looked as best they could. A total wipeout. All they’ve identified so far was a section of a forearm with the letters “SW” tattooed on it, and a partial set of dentures.”

            “Believe it or not, those both belonged to Bully.”

            “Stands to reason,” the sheriff said. “I mean as far as the dentures. Man-fighting, meth, and Mountain Dew don’t make for a full set of choppers.

            “So,” Nelson said, “that about wraps in up?”

            Before the sheriff could answer, three knocks came at his door. “Ah,” he said, “Mrs. M’s secret code. This is important. “Enter.”

            The door opened and a voice said, “Agent Benson is here.”

            “Send ‘Little Jedgar’ in.”

            The door opened fully, and Tom Benson entered. He surveyed the room. “Gentlemen,” he said. He shook hands with Nelson. “I think I owe you an apology for thinking of you as a pest,” he said.

            “Oh?” Nelson said.

            “Yes. I think you’re going to get me transferred to the Beverley Hills office yet.” He turned and shook hands with the sheriff. He nodded back toward Nelson and said. “Just who the hell is this man? He got me credit for solving two interstate crimes in one night.”

            “Just a former sailor,” the sheriff said. He motioned toward an empty chair. “Sit.”

            “I don’t know much more than what I reported to you yesterday,” he said to the sheriff. “We’re getting ready to assemble all we can about Chief of Police Banks over in Connorville and his possible role in all this.”

            Sheriff Love said, “If I know the Weasel, he has covered his tracks pretty well.”

            “Our trackers look hard and deep,” Benson said. “We’ll see what his financial dealings tell us. Right now, I only have one disappointment.”

            Both men sat forward. “Oh?” said the sheriff. “A loose end? I thought all your suspects were all singing “Just as I am without one plea.”

            “They are, pretty much,” Benson said. “Except for one thing.”
            “What’s that?” Nelson asked.

            “They admitted killing Bonnie Sue Anderson. Seems she went to see Dale Underwood because there was something about Bridgette Thompson she hadn’t told anyone, something that could have stirred the pot pretty badly.”

            “Which was?” The sheriff was leaning more toward Benson now.

            “Underwood won’t say,” Benson said, “and she can’t. We may never know. But that’s not the main thing they won’t admit?”

            “What’s that?” the sheriff asked.

            Benson took a deep breath. “None of them will tell us shit about Abbey Stubblefield.”

            “Why?” the sheriff was getting agitated. Nelson showed no emotion.

            “Who knows? Maybe they think they have enough trouble without getting the NAACP on their case as well.”

            The sheriff leaned back and looked at Nelson. “Well now,” he said. Ain’t that a pisser, after all you did for us?”

            “Maybe,” said Nelson. “Just maybe they don’t know.”

            This time it was Benson who leaned forward, toward Nelson. “What do you mean?”

            Nelson shook his head and sorrow showed across it. “You fellas want to take a ride?”

 

 

The Future

 Friend texted: “Why worry? Future only holds that abortions are illegal, no health care, teachers start each school day with a Christian prayer, low-income minority neighborhoods can’t vote, women work for half pay, low minimum wage, and people who own stocks do great. Won’t affect you. It will be just like 1957. Men like you did fine then.” 

Me: “Two things trouble me so.” 

Him: “What?” 

Me: “That pesky U.S. Constitution and the worrisome 25^th Chapter of Matthew.”

Fright

 There was a pregnant woman named Susan Fleming managing the City of Little Rock, and doing a fine job. She calls and says, “I have a perfect volunteer spot for you, the Little Rock City Beautiful Commission.”

 “Oh?” I says.

“Yep. It’s real ‘tea-sipping’ job. No controversy. You just meet and think up ways to make the city even more beautiful than it is.”

 Long pause.

“Oh, and approve landscape plans," she said. I bit.

First meeting, we were to consider plans for UPS to build a significant project out near the airport. Back then, UPS was so cheap they bid out architectural services, and those bids didn’t include one single tree or plant.

“We may just have to locate somewhere else if we have to do landscaping,” their rep said.

Now remember, there was this real character then who wrote editorials for the evening paper, a real curmudgeon (I always heard his brother was worse). His two favorite things were to ruin lives and promote people like Tommy Robinson to high political office. He was always saying things like "I don't suffer from prejudice at all." And any southerner knows what that means. He didn't like public servants, Bill Clinton, or Little Rock. 

Anyhow, I could see the headline: “Tea sippers chase huge project away.” We gulped, cinched, closed our eyes and said, “We have a landscape code with which you must comply.” They did. We prevailed. I learned that courage counts when you have no other choice. Oh, and we had a good role model. A young woman named Sharon Priest was our Chair.

I've been lucky at times.

Stinkin' Logic. Who Needs It?

Strange day yesterday as the remnants of Hurricane Laura rolled through the state. Our electricity was off for only a few minutes, but TV reception was sporadic. Outdoors it was nasty. I cuddled with the latest edition of The Politics of The Administrative Process by Donald Kettl. In the preface, he warns us. From the Flint water crisis to the BP oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, thoughtful people know that “Black Swans” are not only possible, but inevitable. (See: Covid-19.)

Thoughtful people think about those things.

Thoughtful people know we need to elect thoughtful, caring leaders who support thoughtful, accomplished public administrators. But we don’t. We elect people who think government is a joke at best and a mechanism for revenge at worst and who appoint cronies—who despise Americans who aren't like them—to run our agencies. “Why?” I was asking myself that when the TV returned with a newscaster energetically reporting on the “tropical storm.”

I assumed she needed at least a high-school education to be a weather reporter. But she warned us that, after an inch of rain, (despite a month-long dry spell) the ground was now “saturated” to the failing tree roots and we should seek cover. Then she breathlessly reported that her camera-person, who was from Little Rock, had just told her that the Arkansas river normally flowed toward the sea but that “the winds were now forcing it to flow in the opposite direction.” Yes, that Arkansas River. Look out Oklahoma.

The clouds outside remained, but the ones in my head rolled away. Things became clear. If we don’t start thinking, we’re gonna keep sinking.

Affordable Housing

 The answer to affordable housing for service workers may require much broader lateral thinking than we have attempted thus far. It may require cooperation from sources not engaged to date in our analysis, to wit:

The military: It must have hundreds of thousands of helicopters it doesn’t need due to the pressure from legislators representing areas where they make the darn things.

Government Archives: Surely there is some hidden corner of some warehouse where one can find the plans for the internment camps and homes where displaced Japanese families were interned in 1941.

Employment Agencies; They should be able to standardize the shift times of entities employing service workers.

Famers: They will make more money with far less effort by renting plots of farmland to the government.

Highway Construction Departments: A dollar saved by not building commuter lanes is a dollar that can be used for transportation.

President Trump: He will certainly throw his political weight behind a program that will help his make good on his promise to protect the real estate investments of wealthy homeowners.

 By now, the hyper-astute among you can see where this is headed,

Yes.

1. Obtain large segments of vacant land downwind but near major employment centers.
2. Use archived plans to rebuilt exact replicas of the internment camps of WWII.
3. Move service worker families into the camps.
4. Construct multiple helicopter pads adjacent to the camps.
5. Standardize shift schedules at plants, service outlets, retail outlets, etc.
6. Build helicopter pads located within walking distance of major employment centers.
7.  Confiscate, say, 50 percent of the largest helicopters the military has but doesn’t need.
8. Confiscate funds wasted on building commuter lanes.
9. Obtain a couple of presidential executive orders.
10. Tear down any existing low-rent housing near suburban enclaves.
11. Schedule pickup and delivery times.

 Problem solved.

I watched TV a lot yesterday and retired feeling better about things. A country that produced a man like John Lewis can change, and for the better.

 It reminded me of December 1968 when I returned from overseas. I was stranded in Dallas and my brother and Sainted Mother drove there to bring me home. On the way back, we stopped at a small café in southwest Arkansas for breakfast at a classic redneck “greasy spoon.” Burley men with ball caps on their heads and hardness in their eyes gave us a glance and continued eating. My blue Navy uniform with the four ribbons didn’t impress them at all.

 Just as the waitress served us, the door opened and a man in overhauls entered. Holy race riot! Had I survived a year in a war zone to be killed in a brawl in the American South? I searched for a place for us to dive, but the waitress turned and called the intruder by name. “Have a seat, I’ll be right with you. Your usual?” The man answered, “Yes,” nodded at the other men at the room, and took a seat.

 A relaxing warmth of relief and joy flowed through me. I had returned from the war to a different Arkansas. No breakfast has ever tasted as good, and I long to enjoy that feeling once more. Maybe, just maybe.

 Thank you, John Lewis.

Blessed are the poor

Please pardon the length but my heart is too burdened today for brevity. The profession I chose, and still dabble in, has suffered a horrible blow, perhaps a fatal one. Urban planners must deal with countless factors that determine how a city functions. Some challenges appear new and full blown. Solar panels please some and infuriate others. How does a city balance those feelings for the common good? Outside interests buy homes in a quiet neighborhood and covert them into mini-motels. What could possibly go wrong? Digitally active billboards appear that could, some believe, distract already anxiety-burdened motorists. Actually though, it turned out that nobody looked at the darn things. Problem solved.

Throughout recent history, however, the profession sought one goal that would surely have pleased the Galilean. Everyone should have a home—a decent, safe, and sanitary place to come home to after a day’s work. In recent history, a share of the population believes that the worker at a plant should deserve the same domestic solace, albeit not as opulent, as its corporate owner. Others believe that the poor, yes, the ones that Luke mentioned, can contaminated “decent” folks like some unmanageable virus. They advocate having the service workers, teachers, and tradesmen motor into their city, service the needs of the rich, and leave by sundown, to hell with the traffic it requires.

It forms a struggle based as much on religious strictures as fact-based ones. That’s why it weighs so heavy on my heart to read where the president of the United States of American told families in the suburbs that they would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing in their neighborhood” if he remains in office. 

If that vow crushed my heart, think how the Galilean must feel.

The poor will find a place to live.

Wild Guesses

Someone asked me why the North seemed so out-generaled during the Civil War. That’s something that has confounded expert historians since April 1865. A lack of credentials never stopped me yet so here goes.

We must understand that, unlike the common wisdom states, the Civil War was unique in that the losers pretty much wrote the history, at least for a hundred years. Since Virginians largely led the effort, the southern generals were elevated into some mythical status normally reserved for near-gods or superhuman heroes. Lee’s mistakes faded into obscurity while competence on the other side faded into the same vast maw of neglected history.

George Mean decisively defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. For this affront, he never received credit, was largely despised, and is mainly remembered for failing to raising a battered army that had just participated, for three long days, in some of the most savage fighting of the war, and rolling over all the dead bodies to take after a still intact army under highly competent commanders. It didn't help that Meade was not a particularly likable person.

Overall, I think that the trend in Civil War campaigns favored the defensive side, especially when those battles took place on one side’s familiar ground. Meade enjoyed well displaced defensive and familiar positions at Gettysburg much as Lee had at Fredericksburg and the later Virginia campaigns.

We must also realize that generals are only as effective as the troops they lead are trained and ready. The south, it seems to me, was much more motivated throughout the war. We can see from modern examples how a people can be motivated when they think their social order is being threatened.

The commander of Union Forces before Grant was Henry Halleck, a remnant known as "Old Brains." He performed faithfully, but cautiously and festered at the success of subordinates, particularly U.S. Grant. 

There is no doubt that a great number of highly skilled and trained officers chose to fight for the South in April 1861. That included West Point graduates and veterans of the invasion of Mexico. That left the North with many political generals like Dan Sickles who almost cost Meade victory. Of course, the South suffered this to a degree. The left flank of the southern line in the assault on Cemetery Ridge ended up being a brigade commanded by Jefferson Davis’s nephew, a former attorney.

There are individual cases that could be studied. Some think there was ample evidence that George McClellan would have settled for two countries, as long as he could have presided over one of them. It is possible that this motivation caused his reluctance for battle. Some of Meade’s generals were supporters of Joseph Hooker, whom Meade replaced.

Internal political struggles may have hampered the armies of North more than the South. General Grant, for example, never trusted General George Thomas, a Virginian who stayed with the Union and who some believe was the best general on either side of the conflict. I’m sure there were many generals in the Army of the Potomac who never trusted Grant.

There is the matter of luck, but both sides seemed to fare equally in this respect.

There is also, I believe, the question of individual maniacy. We can go to the modern Middle East to see the effectiveness of armies composed of men bearing systemic hatred who join wars to avoid a harsh life with the belief that, upon a final sacrifice, they will ascend immediately into Paradise.

I’ll close with the question of collective manic obsession. Any observer should have known after July 3, 1863, that the South would never win that war, nor would they be recognized by England as a nation. Lee and Davis chose to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Americans rather than admit that reality. That is a lesson we should take under consideration even unto this day.

In closing, as the combatant said in North Dallas Forty, “What could have happened did happen."                                                                                                                                                                                      

Old Days. Old Ways.

For some reason yesterday, I began thinking of my fifth-grade elementary school teacher. Her name was Edith Rupe and she enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most popular teachers at Lakeside Elementary in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an all-white institution of learning at the time.

I know little of her private life. I know she was unmarried and lived in a boarding house that I think was located on Sixth Street, at the edge of Downtown. The school was on 15^th Street so she walked or rode the bus to and fro. A bus ran within a block of the school.

I can’t determine what her salary would have been. Some records indicate teachers were paid an average of $3,000 per year but I can’t imagine that they were paid half that in my hometown. The African-American teachers probably received less than half that of white teachers.

At any rate, it was a lonely and minimal experience that she must have led as she trained young minds to face the future. Her only companion was a parakeet who died when I was in her class. She squashed our offer to take up collection for a replacement, choosing more loneliness over more heartbreak. Televisions wouldn’t become common for several years, so it is a bit comforting to know that she lived only a few blocks from the (white) city library.

Boarding houses, rooming houses, or resident hotels, as they were called, afforded a common source of housing for American workers who could not afford the $9,000 average cost of a new home or the $80 per month average rent of a full apartment. Rooms at a boarding house included meals. Patrons relied primarily on public transit or walking for access to jobs. Boarding houses existed well into the 1970s and began to fade from the urban landscape. Here is the last one I remember.

It stood in Little Rock a few blocks from our state’s Capitol and the building exists to this day. It has been recycled as a commercial use for decades.

What caused the demise of boarding houses? They once served as entry-level abodes for newcomers moving to the city for their first job. Safety made them popular with young females. Low price made them popular with students. Racial conditions made them segregated.

Some scholars blame local zoning and building codes for the passing of this type of dwelling. I’m sure that played its part, although most zoning ordinances in our state still list them as an allowable use in certain districts, as long as those districts are far away from the rich folks.

At the same time, building codes portray the audacity of requiring that buildings have adequate structural components, safe electrical systems, and meet the nebulous social designation of being “decent, safe, and sanitary.”

Also, most areas of our state lack public transit systems, and despite the urging of planners, walking to work in temperatures of 90-plus degrees and 100-percent humidity isn’t nearly as socially soothing as it might seem.

That brings up the matter of the automobile as the default system of conveyance. Even a modest requirement of one parking space per unit might require more space for the automobile than for the tenants.

Some murmuring is circulating that boarding houses might represent at least a partial solution to the present crisis in affordable housing and its tragic offspring: homelessness. As with many elements of the urban landscape, most people would consider that a fine idea, as long as the results didn’t end up anywhere near their own backyard.

And so it goes.

Modern Living

Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking about affordable housing. Everyone seems obsessed with it. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it. One of the problems is that the places needing it most urgently are the places where the market, and many times other forces, resist it most fervently. Some of those cities that I call “Modern Boom Towns,” try to encourage construction of housing for the working class. They find though, that, upon construction, the market pushes rents or selling prices far out of the reach of those most in need. They must find transportation from places where affordable housing exists. The distances they must travel grow greater with each year of local regional prosperity.

One type of housing upon which the poor depended in years gone by exists largely in photographs of yesteryear, for example: 

These once dotted the rural landscape of the agricultural South. They provided homes for farm laborers and sharecroppers. I’m told that my parents lived in one of these after their marriage while sharecropping near the Ladd community south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

 The homes consisted of three rooms in a row with a straight shot from the front door to the rear door, hence the name “shotgun houses,” as a weapon fired through the front door would go straight through the rear door.

 In certain areas, such homes consisted of an addition story or half-story. In cities they were lined side by side. As neighbors began to escape the bitterest of poverty, two of the homes might be connected to make one. This earned them the local moniker of “double-barreled shotgun houses.”

Photographer/writer Rian Dundon wrote in an essay in Timeline of the location of such home in urban areas: "The precise origins of the shotgun house are up for debate. Some scholars trace the style back to West Africa, where an early 19th century boom in New Orleans’ Afro-Haitian population introduced the distinctive structures. But the ubiquity of shotgun houses throughout the urban south can also be viewed as a variation on the typical one-room farm house—rotated 90 degrees for a better fit in the city’s narrow lots."

 In one of those cases of irony that tend to confuse us, the archetypal “shotgun house” has been adopted by a new and different breed of owner. The one below represents a head-turning case. The owner obtained it for free just before demolition, moved it, and “fixed it up” for $140,000 as a part time lodging place and part-time short-term rental ($350 per night). He then listed it for sale for just under a million dollars. No sharecroppers or service workers need apply.

Most examples in our state  have disappeared. One of the last stood for years just outside the Delta city of Marvell, Arkansas, a fixer-upper for certain had it been saved.

I

 

 

 

 

Warnings

Might start a novel. Here’s an idea. I would call it “The Death Call of Easy.” An asteroid is about to hit the U.S. It’s not like the Yucatan monster 66 million years back, the one that got the dinosaurs. This one is small and is going to hit in the middle of Death Valley. All Americans have to do is stay away until after it hits. The news outlet said so, quoting the scientists.

Here is my draft opening: “A sea of red hats flowed over the thin line of guards, smothering their feeble protests into the scorching sand. The crowd rushed into the fiery void. The heat turned the sweat on the faces beneath the hats into steam and a layer of fog waved over the red flood like a death shroud covering a corpse.”

Or, maybe … “It was a dark and stormy night. The government had warned the inhabitants of The Villages to seek shelter, but a crowd had gathered at the lake shore, where the fake sailboats danced merrily in the wind like the opening act of a dark vaudeville show.”

Or, maybe I'll go do something else to pass the Quarantime.


                                     

Urban Planning

Been reading the MIT book Critical Thinking by Jonathan Haber. In light of a possible new assignment, I'v become interested in so-called "Venn Diagrams." On top of it all, I've often felt compelled to develop a unified theory of urban planning, my chosen profession.

Now you have to understand, my profession attracts a great deal of silliness.

Have a problem with affordability? Simple, just eliminate parking requirements.

Need affordable housing? Build tiny homes. It will wear you out explaining to the gurus that a 200-square-foot tiny home in San Jose, California would sell for maybe a half million dollars, more in "The City." (That's what they like to call San Francisco.)

Want to bring economic windfalls to your city? Require every home to have a front porch, and, by the way, prohibit the most popular type home in the suburban market, the so-called "snout house." It serves the dual purpose of announcing to neighbors and the driving public that its owner can afford two or more vehicles while providing a widely appreciated place for "Happy Hour" traffic watching.

Planners hate them.
Joe Six-Pack loves them.

Get the picture? Well rest easy. I've developed a simple theory to explain where we are in America in terms of urban planning. It is very clear and illustrative. Here you are.

Fighting the Blues

Another day of tumultuous news. It makes it hard to stay positive. I work on it by thinking back to my parents’ generation. Can you imagine living through The Great Depression, the “dust bowl" catastrophe, and the collapse of social order in one lifetime? Just imagine the relief upon emerging alive. Then imagine seeing a faint glimmer of hope just as the radio announces the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Oh, it may have been a “great generation.” I won’t argue that point. I think all generations have some greatness in them, along with their share of shortcomings. I know that many think the so-called “Baby Boomers” had theirs. I point out to you, though, that many of them went, when their country asked, to an immoral war during a time that had its share of tumultuousness. More than 50,000 of them never returned alive. All provided their service under criminally poor leadership, a service for which their country has never forgiven them.

We all press on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” Today the dreadful past has created a gaping hell hole that draws us toward the bigotry, hatred, and racial injustice from which we had thought we were escaping. We had hoped against hope that past racism lay dormant, but like a 1950s subterranean movie monster, we awoke it by electing a man of color as president.

Now, bigotry is creeping over us like a blob landed on Earth from an unfriendly planet. In its worst form, we find that it is a political tool—a highly effective political tool. “I hate the same people that you do,” has replaced "We're all in this together," and “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Will we survive? It seems up for grabs as some at the highest echelons of power seem, for some indeterminable reason, to be using all the power at their disposal to prevent it.

For hope, I look back, as I say, to the generation before mine. Their country survived, although not as intact for some of its citizens as for others. And when I think of how hard the struggle for survival was for my parents, I can only marvel at how much more difficult it would have been for them had they not been white.

Would today have been different had more Americans voted out of hope rather than out of media-induced dislike? I don't know. As Ernest Hemingway said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Sadness On The Land

Back to Gettysburg. The news of recent days distracted me. Finally, I decided that it seemed appropriate to return to a previous crisis in which 85,000 men fought to save the Union and dissolve slavery and 75,000 men fought to save slavery and dissolve the Union. It started when elements of Heth’s Division stumbled into Union Forces north of the city of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and ended when Robert E. Lee withdrew his defeated army and retreated to Virginia. More than 7,000 soldiers and one civilian, a woman named Jennie Wade would lie dead. The Union would survive and the bigotry and inhumanity that ignited would end.

They thought. We thought.

I once worked with a great-grandson of Thomas G. Clark who marched into Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 with his two sons Jonathan and Albert as members of the 42^nd Mississippi Regiment under BG Joe Davis, a nephew of Jefferson. He shared transcripts of letters now in the Confederate Museum at Oxford, TN.  Captain Clark had written to his wife on June 13^th: “Try to keep in good spirits for I intent to come home this summer or fall to stay for I think that the Boys have had experience enough now to git along without me and it is my duty to pay some attention to my family at home and in fact I think that I am gitting to old and have become unhealthy and I think that in justice to myself and family at home it it is my duty to quit this army at least for a while.” [Grammar transcribed as written.]

Thomas and his son Jonathon would die on July 1, when General Heth’s division ran into that of General Buford. Many of Davis's men would die in an abandoned railroad cut when he lost control of the division after an initial victory. It's likely this included the father and son. No one knows where they are buried.

Albert would die on July 3 as part of the left flank making the assault on Cemetery Ridge. A few of the men in that sad and battered regiment would make it to Emmetsburg Road and maybe 50 would cross it. The Virginian descendants of the Pickett’s fresh division would cruelly blame those on the far left for the failure of the insanely ordered assault. History can be as deceitful as the present.

A granddaughter would later write of the widow and mother of the Clark men: “When the news of this awful disaster reached home, Grandmother Clark prayed and shouted all night, and she often told us in speaking of those days that we didn’t know what sorrow was.”

Renown author Zora Neale Hurston would have one of her characters in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” express the war differently: “But it was a long time after dat befo’ de Big Surrender at Richmond. Den de big bell ring in Atlanta and all de men in gray uniforms had to go to Moultrie, and bury their swords in the ground to show they was never to fight about slavery no mo’. So den we knowed we was free.”

Free? As we have found over the last days, not quite yet.

Day One: The Railroad Cut

Orphans in a Storm

 Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can say about a situation. In fact, I have come to realize that for some situations, it’s just better to say nothing. Saying something you had to think up that might fit the moment just sounds like a self-serving plea for absolution. I found that out years ago.

Two days after James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, the I – Corps area of the then Republic of South Vietnam was tense, almost as tense as it was the previous January during the Tet Offensive. Bars were closed and all access to alcohol stopped. American military bases were on “lockdown,” and nobody was saying much, not much at all in our compound just outside Da Nang. Events halfway around the world had our little universe on the brink of explosion.

That morning, they chose me—perhaps because I was a little older than most in the Naval Security detachment—and another sailor because he was an unofficial leader among what everyone called “the brothers” back then, to guard the far back gate of our compound. We knew one another as shipmates, nothing more. We were just two wary souls thrown together in the face of a storm we neither chose nor caused. They told us that no one was to leave, and no one was to enter.

I strained my brain for the six hours while we stood the watch for something to say. Nothing came. So we did our duty and stopped anyone from leaving and joining some fracas or other. I stopped the white sailors and he stopped the black sailors. Had any of them refused, I have no idea what would have happened. We, of course, would have been fully authorized to fire upon them. To this day, I don’t know what would have happened. We stood our watch and turned the post over to our reliefs. It was dark by then and tensions had cooled. We nodded to one another and parted. I was sent up to a mountain compound shortly thereafter and I don’t think we ever saw one another again.

I’m not African American, so I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be in constant strife with the authority around me. I cannot image what it would be like always to stand guilty whether innocent or not. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be viewed as a lesser form of citizen. I have endured curt glares and some caustic comments, but only because of some service ribbons given to me “by a thankful nation.” Those looks and comments mostly came from fellow servicemen, so I had to overlook them.

I’ve never been a police officer. Those I have known personally have been honorable people. I have no idea how it would feel to drive the mean streets of a city on the midwatch, with suspicious eyes staring from every windshield and every bedroom, not knowing which car seat contained a loaded pistol. I do know that I’ve been alone during those same dark hours with the safety of my comrades in my hands, so scared I would have shot my own mother had she burst out of the jungle and ran toward me.

So I’ll pass no judgement on the community of police officers. Neither will I condemn those who riot. I have no idea what I would do if my genetic improbabilities had developed differently. I’d probably be rioting, but who knows?

I’ve witnessed and watched, though, and I’ve lived a long time. I feel entitled to make some observations, not judgments mind you, just observations.

Sadly, there is a percentage of Americans who simply don’t like people of color. It may be from ignorance, lack of communion, radical nurture, tribalism, a penchant for homogeneity, shortsightedness, fear, racial prejudice, bigotry, xenophobia, or some social disorder. We used to call it all those things. We’ve now collapsed them, and linguistically elevated them to the simple “racism.” Wars on nouns are always dicey, but this one sets a particularly high bar.

Now I don’t know what the percentage of those to whom I referred is. I suspect it’s around 30 percent of white Americans, larger in the South. It's not enough to determine elections if the righteous and pure of heart wish it otherwise. I do know something about white Americans of righteous bearing. It is good to have them on your side, or at least in tacit support of one’s fundamental rights as a human being. That tacit support can be a strong ally. Ask the American Freedom Fighters of the 1960s. I also know that it is subject to being added to or taken from, sometimes becoming a welcome ally, at others a missing friend. Ask Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both affected by the margins. Increasingly, it seems to me, those increments determine our elections.

I'm not talking only about those who sit out elections. I'm also talking about those who may base a vote on the fact that a freeway was blocked by protesters while they tried to get their sick child to a hospital. Unfocused retribution falls on the just and the unjust.

Adroit politicians and those whose primary purpose is to win first and be right later, will avoid actions that effect the tacit support that can determine revolutions as well as elections. I know that elections increasingly turn on small increments of support.

I also know that Donald Trump is an expert at manipulating the support and moving the flexible fringe toward his side.

He needs no help whatsoever.