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.