The Redoubtable Ms Dowd
(Ms Maureen Bridgid Dowd, 60, in 2008. Photo Denise Williams.)
I have no sense of what Mr. Boehner and Mr. Obama discussed yesterday behind closed doors. I hope something is happening that will enable cooler heads to prevail, and some compromise can be found to accommodate something short of complete disaster, but I have no particular optimism on that score. I did my due diligence, though, with a certain morbid fascination.
It could go better or much worse, of course. One thing is for sure: this is all quite expensive and we are all going to pay more. That is not an observation about politics as much as it is a sober assessment of state of the defense industry. That may be one of the things Maureen Brigid Dowd could do without, or at least much less of it.
That led me, in a roundabout fashion, to read her latest venomous and entertaining post: “A Lost Civilization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-lost-civilization.html
I like her. She is one of the stars of the NY Times OpEd pages: the Gray Lady’s gray lady. I like the way she writes- I have been impressed for years with the craft she bestows on her various screeds. She does have a way with words. She won a Pulitzer back in the last century for distinguished commentary, and is an authentic inside-the-Beltway muse, having been here since her college days at Catholic University.
(Maureen’s provocative dismissal of the other half of the race.)
She is uncertain about whether men are necessary- which would be incorrect uttered the other way- but I take her point.
Her Sunday column she artfully commingled the Mayan end-of-the-world calendar with the eclipse of white males in our society. It was a grand romp- and had a couple elements of truth that I had to contemplate during the drive back up north in the rain from Refuge Farm.
“The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.”
She scourges Mitt, of course, with the famous 47% comment about those dependent on the government, which will surely swell to over 50% in this Obama second term. But she also makes the fine point about why the victory happened, noting ” …the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.”
Fair enough, I say. Hispanics tend to be Catholics, and social conservatives to boot. It is entirely possible that once the GOP gets over the hysteria about being overwhelmed at today’s version of the Alamo, things may even out.
A pal noted the other day that there has been a net decline in the tide of legal and illegal immigration, and the birthrate for Hispanic women is plummeting. The predicted dramatic demographic changes may have already hit a watershed. It will not matter to me much, I don’t think, since I will be in the ground before the greater trends are revealed in some future census. But Maureen’s castigation of the Republicans went on to note this from historian Will Durant:
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
I can get behind that, possibly not quite the way she may have intended.
After some extended disparagement of Mr. Romney, and allusion to the concluding quote from “Gone With the Wind,” (Margaret Mitchell, to my knowledge, was not an angry white male) she characterizes the superfluous males directly: “Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm themselves.”
That is a most curious sort of thing, since I tend to agree with her completely on this point- though “Dead Ender” is not precisely the way I would characterize it.
She does think that the hand-off from Mr. Obama to Ms. Clinton, augmented by the redoubtable Mr. Bill, will solidify the Progressive hegemony for the next dozen years, and perhaps forever.
I don’t know about that. I can take another lesson from all this. We have had trouble before in this nation, and put a lid on simmering resentment regarding the notion of rulers and ruled- and the position of the several states in the construct of governance.
I mentioned the other day how strange it seems that the national government is lurching left as the states appear to be lurching right.
Should the oil and gas boom play out as has been predicted- with no spirit in the divided Congress to actually address the cost-benefit of massive extraction of fossil fuel and the possible transformation of oil-thirsty importer to net exporter- the EPA will attempt to clamp down on the industry through executive fiat.
The temptation of the windfall profits to the largely Red State exchequers will be powerful. It appears there is an increasing tendency for the States to nullify what they perceive as Federal interference in their affairs. It is similar to the Executive Branch ruling through executive order, sidestepping the legislative process altogether. The states have responded by refusing to set up health insurance exchanges.
That is really quite remarkable. As many as 30 states are in some form of denial about implementing the basic mechanism that supports the Affordable Care Act, either refusing to participate altogether or deferring to some sort of partnership with the Feds.
I had thought that this was all settled a long time ago.
But maybe it is not. It could mean the stars are aligning for another tectonic shift in the body politic as fundamental as the one that killed the Whigs.
Me? I am no dead ender. For the record, I view rape as a violent and horrific crime. I oppose transvaginal ultrasound, favor medical marijuana, have no opposition to same-sex marriage, and welcome hardworking immigrants to America’s big tent.
To that end, I am hedging my bets. I have been working on my pigeon Spanish, just in case, but also purchased a new Remington Wingmaster 870 pump shotgun. It has some fancy engraving on it celebrating the 2nd Amendment.
We will see how it goes, won’t we?
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
A Game You Can Believe In
How the heck did this happen? Two weeks to Christmas?
Maybe it is because we don’t call it that, anymore. I think we are just being polite, you know, don’t want to offend anyone, after all, and inclusive is a good thing to be. Still, just calling it “the holidays” sort of robs it of a center-of-mass, and makes it much more amorphous than a hard date when predictable things are supposed to happen.
Or maybe it is just me. It doesn’t feel much like Christmas. The weather was balmy down at the Farm, and the gray skies of the capital opened up to light blue with wispy cirrus clouds. Out on the back deck I could hear the faint buzz of private aviation from T.I. Martin Field on the other side of the Brandy Station battlefield.
It was magnificent. I went over to the Big Box and got some drop clothes add to my collection of crap, this being a means to cover the crap with additional crap. I was done in time to switch on the flatscreen and watch the opening ceremonies for The Game.
I had developed the habit of watching it at Army-Navy Country Club, where I remain an absentee member. The old club house had a cavernous Members Grill where some unreconstructed vets could smoke cigars and drink beer and scoop up complementary popcorn and hot dogs smothered in chili, cheese and chopped onions.
There is a new clubhouse this year, and the smokers have been banished to the basement someplace I have not discovered as yet.
I thought the Farm would be a new tradition, and it was a grand one. The Russians showed up and joined in a wine and vodka-fueled celebration of a magnificent rivalry.
It is not real 1A football, of course. The Academy brand of football is never going to be mistaken for an SEC pro powerhouse, even if Navy stunned Notre Dame a couple times when the Golden Domers were down.
Even worse, the Midshipmen had run the table for a decade on the Cadets- an intolerable situation for the kids from West Point. It is fading now, but I remember when the Black Knights of the Hudson made hapless Middies their buffet. But it didn’t matter. No one from this game was going on to the NFL- they are all going to get orders, salute and move out smartly.
Maybe that is why it is special. Most college athletes will never be good enough to go pro- that is a fact. Yet the possibility of vast riches keeps a lot of young men in the hunt for fortune and fame. In the process they provide us all semi-pro entertainment allegedly with connection to the institutions of higher learning we may- or may not have- attended on the way to whatever happened to us after.
That is clearly not what Army-Navy is about, and the rivalry has a certain antique patina about it.
(Saturday Evening Post view of the game. Image 1946 by Crocket)
It was a great game. I had a spinach dip, one of those fabulous baguettes from Croftburn Farm, pimento dip, pretzels and dried peas rolled in wasabi to counteract the effect of the alcohol a bit.
Army had heart and a real shot at winning right to the final second. The Russians were amazed. I would have loved it if that last field goal had beaten the Midshipmen instead of arcing left and outside the goalpost. And you cannot put the ball on the ground as the Cadets did once too often to win.
Good new tradition at Refuge Farm. It’s a game you can believe in.
Chapter Nine
(A view of the abandoned Eddystone Hotel near the Detroit Masonic Temple, largest in the world, and sort of threadbare. Photo Socotra.)
There is such a lot not to talk about this morning. I am piling up crap to take to the farm and to the dump and am not completely sure which pile is which.
It certainly appears to be time to start leaning all this crap down. The mass of material that came with the dissolution of the estate made me realize internalize something that first occurred to me on Portobello Road in London a few years back. You can find anything under the sun in the stall along the road. For sale is everything in the attic of the old empire.
This is a microcosm here, and while I can, I ought to get it sorted out so the kids can make decisions about it all. And make mine first.
A pal told me that I was a pack-rat and I could never do it. Maybe she is right, but I am going to give it a try. She is right that everything has a story, and sundered from it, the objects are cut loose in time and space. Being mute, they lose all context and animation. With no story attached, it is all just junk.
Still, there is too much of it. I need to start letting things go.
(A once-magnificent gothic structure just off Woodward Ave. Rooms $10. Photo Socotra.)
They are letting Detroit go, by the way. There is some astonishing news emanating from the Wolverine State. We can talk about the Right-to-Work struggle between the Red Counties and the old industrial cities like Flint, Saginaw, and Bay City and MoTown itself. This is going to be something like a re-play of what happened in Wisconsin last summer. But we can talk about that some other time. It is happening now, I understand, because the Red Counties have solid majorities in the lame-duck legislature but will not have the same margin in the new session.
There is something very strange about all this. The National Government is lurching left, while many of the states are doing an equally dramatic lurch to the right. Very curious.
Anyway, City of Detroit is about to experience a coup d’etat orchestrated by Governor Snyder and his Treasurer. They are going to conduct a fiscal review of the finances of Dtroit.
It will surprise no one that the city is a disaster. The Governor is trying to coordinate a “managed bankruptcy” of the Motor City.
I take all this a little personally. I have a fascination with the town in which I was born. It may verge on what they call “Ruin Porn,” which is a way of non-mainstreaming the curiosity in the devolution of industrial age structures back into the clay.
Frozen in time, the city is. A sort of social Chernobyl.
I think it is probably political correctness in another manifestation. But there is something so strange about looking at abandoned sky-scrapers from the People Mover that seems to move no one to anywhere in particular.
I have been gone far too long to be guilty of boosterism- but there are some things up there that are so fascinating that it tempts me to go back and live life among the ruins. You can literally buy a perfectly good house on your credit card there- but more about that when we get to it tomorrow.
The Chapter Nine filing for what was once the fifth largest city in America (behind the Big Apple, Windy City, Philly and LA) will be a circus. As recently as 1990, the city was still in the top 10. The latest census data suggests that it will tumble to 19th, behind Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
There is enough vacant land in the city limits to hold the city of Paris.
I am not saying this is a microcosm of anything in particular. It is interesting that the top nine employers who remain in the city are either government of one stripe or another (Public Schools, City, Federal Government, etc, or health-care). General Motors comes in at Number 10.
Nothing new. This problem has been going on as long as I have been alive. It just had so far to fall.
Anyway, more on that tomorrow. I want to get down to the farm and light a fire in the cast-iron stove and chill.
And be thankful I don’t live in Wayne County. Of course, the old town may get a new start, be reborn once this is over. I will be interested in seeing the previews for what could happen a lot of places if we don’t take care of things.
Poor old Detroit can’t print its own money. If they could, you bet they would.
Remember Pearl Harbor
(Pearl Harbor, 0755…While the Giant Slept. Image copyright Dru Blair.)
You know what day it is. National Public Radio played a few bars from the old song that advises us to remember before they got on with some wild assertions from the President of the World Bank, Dr. James Kim, and analysis of the Right to Work legislation in Blue Michigan, which seems to have a Red government.
I am going to defer on both issues in honor of the day. I think about living on the shores of Pearl Harbor, and the men and women who were serving there on The Day. Mac made them come alive to me: Eddie Layton, and Joe Rochefort and Tommy Dyer and Jasper Holmes. And a step removed from the men he worked with, poor Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen Walter Short, who both took the fall for the colossal series of mistakes that made the surprise attack possible and devastating.
The Macaroon Lady on the Left Coast is till fighting a rear guard action to reveal the cover-up about who knew what on this day 71 years ago. I wish her well on her quest. I would like to see the record set straight.
I used to make a point of talking to Mac on Pearl Harbor Day, or at least getting him a note of remembrance. With the proximity of his passing over to the other shore to join his shipmates, this is an especially poignant anniversary. He was not one of the increasingly small number of Survivors, since he arrived by boat from the Mainland several weeks after the attacks.
In February, 1942, the wreckage was still new, and the prospects of the fight were ominous.
His first vision of Pearl was of the shipyard workers swarming over the beached hull of USS Nevada at Hospital Point. The rest of the great ships were still sunk in the mud of the harbor, and the eerie sight of the bottom of the great hull of Oklahoma alongside her berth.
The image above is a reproduction of artist Dru Blair’s vision of the moment Lieutenant Commander Takahashi Kakuichi’s Aichi D3A1 Type 99 “Val” Dive bomber rolls in on Hangar 6 on the southern tip of Ford Island. By accident, Takahashi was the first to drop his ordnance because of a mistake in interpreting the signal flares beginning the attack. Takahashi’s bomb struck the water’s edge in front of hangar 6 located at 5 o’clock in this picture.
Let’s get oriented. The Army side of the Ford Island flight line is to the left.
We worked in the headquarters building two structures counter-clockwise from the first bomb hit. We jogged around the island, sometimes twice, for physical training at lunch. Wreckage from the salvage operations still littered the shore, including bits of ancient steel cable used to right the capsized USS Oklahoma were on the shore. USS Utah is still at the berth where she was sunk, as is Arizona, under her graceful white inverted arch. Both ships are still afloat in this image, for a few moments more.
The Pacific Aviation Museum is now housed in the former seaplane hangars. USS Missouri, where the war ended, is now berthed ahead of the hulk of Arizona, representing the Alpha and Omega of the great struggle.
McGrew Point is just to the right center of the top margin of the painting. We lived at 121 McGrew Loop and our view from the lanai looked right down Battleship Row.
Blair’s painting is often described as one of the most accurate representations of how things looked that morning as we transitioned from peace to war. My copy of this print is signed by the artist and numbers 847 of a print run of 1941.
I heard the artist got a helicopter to take him to the exact spot on this day at exactly 0755 so he could get the shadows just right.
(An aerial view of Ford Island, taken from nearly the same vantage as Blair’s painting in October of 1941. Note the carrier pier side to the right center. Thank God the flat-tops were at sea that morning and escaped harm. There is currently a plan by the Navy to place an enormous solar panel farm on the old runway, surrounded by a seven-foot fence. If you think that this is sacrilegious, you would be right. Sign the petition at Change.Org if you agree. Photo USN.)
http://www.change.org/petitions/remember-pearl-harbor-save-historic-ford-island-runway
(Famed aviation artist Robert Taylor created this image of the second wave of the attack. Image copyright Robert Taylor).
A little after an hour after the first bomb fell, USS Nevada had slipped her moorings and proceeded down the channel to Hospital Point, where she (fortunately) was beached. Had she been caught exiting the channel by the second wave of the attack, she would have gone down in hundreds of fathoms of water. As it was, she was re-floated and fought her way across the Pacific to join the occupation Fleet in Tokyo Bay.
(Civilian casualty of the Japanese attack. Photo USN).
I had hoped for a quiet day today for some contemplation and organization, but it does not look like it is going to happen. The above picture is one I had not seen before. It makes you pretty grateful for the sacrifice of Mac’s generation. It enables us to drive to work without confronting the Empire of Japan.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Brubek Blues
(PR photo of Dave Brubek in 1956. Photo AP).
I was thinking about the passing of Dave Brubeck, whose astonishing syncopated time-scales links me back to the little dining room in the house on Chester Street in Birmingham, Michigan.
Dad was an aficionado of cool jazz, and I recall dancing with my brother and sister to “Take Five” in 1959- I would have been eight then- and the 45rpm record of “Hound Dog” by Elvis which was getting scratchy from play in the RCA portable record player since it was released in 1956.
What a different world it was! Modern style had leapt across the War from the elites of the 1930s and finally percolated down to suburbia. The WWII vets were just hitting their stride- Dave Brubek had done his time in the Army, like just about everyone.
I know every generation has its challenges, and the Eisenhower years were by no means as placid as we like to think. But to have come from there to here in one life…well, it boggles the mind.
I will miss Mr. Brubek. He was so cool.
I almost slipped this morning- it was so tempting to pick at the story about the First Family’s Winter Holiday extravaganza in Hawaii. The lurid account of the logistics of the holiday got me going.
Some GOP operative in Hawaii counted the expenses and estimated it will be $4 million for the jets and hotels and security and armored limos and the ambulance and a separate jet for Bo-the-dog.
When I was living on the other side of the island, we were required to put our canines in doggy-jail for six months. It was part of the quarantine that kept rabies out of the lovely islands. Bo may be able to duck the requirement, if he is required to be there on official business.
It doesn’t seem fair that some dogs get out of jail free, and other dogs are confined longer than they would if they had stuck up a Zippy’s restaurant in Waikiki.
You can tee off on me for not approving of the astonishing luxury in which we keep our Chief Executives- This is not a partisan issue, as far as I am concerned. Hell, let’s give a nod to George W. Bush, whose extended vacations on a sand-blasted ranch in Crawford Texas used to irritate the Washington Post so desperately.
What causes me consternation is the fact that we are supposed to be worried about that “fairness” thing.
(Larry Ellison is going to make ‘his’ island ‘green.’ Like it wasn’t already. Photo Oracle).
Of course this is not fair. Larry Ellison, CEO of the Oracle software empire, just bought the entire island of Lanai. I don’t know what the residents think about that. It is not like a President showing up for a few weeks R&R after a tough campaign. It is more like an occupying army. Certainly not fair, but at least it is Larry’s money and I can’t get too worked up about it.
Course, it is not fair that the antics of our elected officials is going to smack my little industry like a OB smacks the butt of a newborn, with the same yelp of sudden awareness. But what the hell.
Life ain’t fair, is it? I wonder why Washington seems to think they can make it so. Blows my mind.
(Somewhere, it is always Christmas for the Presidents. Photo AP.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Crusaders
I am shivering a little this morning with mental exhaustion. I just finished the tribute issue of the Quarterly for Mac Showers and shipped it off to lay-out, and it was both emotional and hard, since I had to scoop up some representative stories from our long collaboration to illustrate some of his remarkable life.
I am a man and will never know the miracle of gestation and the labor of birth, but I have seen it up close. The feeling I am feeling now must be something like it.
Meanwhile, life goes on and the calendar is full as the Winter heads this way.
I was asked by a secular saint named Annie to “cover” a surprise birthday party for a legendary Nasal Radiator last night.
The back-story was much more than an ordinary birthday celebration for an iconic old man. Annie is very special in my life, and she has a story of personal courage that I would love to tell sometime. She let me tell her mother’s amazing story about adventures in the former Yugoslavia a few years ago, thankfully before the delightful woman passed from this world.
I have been honored to be along for several of the Last Crusades. Rex Rectanus had one- to honor the memory of Jack Graf, the captured LDO who wounnd up getting shot down by the VC and was tortured and ultimately killed. My suspicions are that he got as far as Lubianka or someplace in the Gulag and could even be alive today- but that was not the point.
Rex felt personally responsible and worked hard to have his memory revived. I was happy to help.
I missed Mac’s last quest- when I knew him, he was a teacher, mentor and guide for folks confronting cancer and Alzheimers, but his Last Crusade was to circumvent the wartime distortions of the vile Redman Brothers and get Joe Rochefort the DSM he so richly deserved for breaking the JN-25 Naval codes and enabling the most astonishing five minutes of the Pacific War at Midway. Then the Redman brothers stabbed him in the back, got his medal denied, trashed his reputation and got the most gifted cryptologist of his era shipped off to command a floating dry-dock.
Joe died before Mac ultimately succeeded, as did Chester Nimitz and Jasper Holmes did, though they had tried to correct the travesty. Mac pulled it off. Ted Bronson is trying to do the same sort of thing.
(ENS Edward F. “Ted” Bronson.)
Ted Bronson was, in the words of Annie: “Loving son, Uncle, Godfather, Man of God, Loyal American, Raconteur, Pack Rat extraordinaire, Relentless, Faithful, Paion in the Posterior, Philanthropist, Loyal Friend, Passionate, Aviator Beyond Compare, and generally the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Just ask him.
Anyway, Annie had a health scare this year, and honoring Ted is one of the things she decided to move off the bucket list and have a minor crusade about.
Ted has a crusade, too, which I will get to in a minute.
His 80th birthday was yesterday, and Annie pulled out all the stops to honor him. She hired the ballroom of the new Army-Navy Country Club, got a pianist to play holiday songs, full bar, great buffet and lots of influential people. She asked me to come and take pictures, and as the Jimmy Olsen of volunteer publications, I was happy to comply.
(Ted Bronson and mistress-of-ceremonies Lisa Newell).
Ted was a Spad driver- first 2,000 hours of Navy flight time in the big bomb-hauler, then stints in A-4 Scooters and A-7 Corsair IIs on nearly all the Navy’s big decks.
(Ted at the controls of the big AD Skyraider.)
He was an aviator’s aviator, and arced across Annie’s attention when she was laboring in the upper reaches of the Pentagon with the rambunctious and personable almost not JOs in the back room of LA-5.
Last night was a glittering affair, though the usual Washington traffic demons were on display- the GW Parkway was abruptly closed, and one of the Interstates leading into the Imperial City had major problems. What do they say? “In Washington you are either a half hour early or a half hour late.”
No happy mediums. There were several former flag officers who have passed through Annie’s tender ministrations, and they were there, bigger than life, including Dick Mackey, the former CINCPAC.
(Annie’s long-suffering husband Fred. I have been hearing about him for years. Great guy, and he an Annie have a hell of a story themselves.)
Ted was touched to see so many old friends, and there was genuine warmth in the air, and the conversations were fascinating. I saw Fred Rainbow, with whom I have been corresponding since 1979 at the Naval Institute (worth a story sometime) and people embarked on other quests and crusades, including a guy who is creating a Cold War Gallery to go along with Gary Power’s Cold War Museum.
Anyway, Ted’s crusade of the moment is the creation of a Saint.
Of course, only God and the Church can do that, but I was intrigued since the prayer card for a Navy Chaplain named Vince Capodanno is on my refrigerator. I am not much for organized religion, but Vince was someone special. His Medal of Honor Citation speaks volumes about courage an sacrifice, and Father Capodanno paid the ultimate price.
The medal was awarded for actions in 1967 under with the 5th Marines in the Thang Binh District of the Que-Son Valley. Vince was with Company D, which was hit hard. By mid-morning in the fight, twenty-six Marines were dead and the situation was in doubt. Vince heard the reports and rushed to the sound of the guns with reinforcements from Company M.
The fighting was hand-to-hand. Vince went among the wounded and dying, giving last rites and taking care of his Marines. Wounded once in the face and suffering another wound that almost severed his hand, Father Capodanno moved to help a wounded corpsman only yards from an enemy machine gun. Vince died taking care of one of his men.
SECNAV Paul Ignatius awarded the MOH posthumously to Vince on January 7, 1969.
But that is not Ted’s quest- he is pressing for Vince to be recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as a Saint.
As you know, that is a long process, but from what I saw of Ted Bronson last night, that is just about the right sort of crusade for the World’s Greatest Naval Aviator.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Peggy’s Place
(Great-Great Uncle Patrick, the loveable rogue of the 10th Tennessee (Irish). Photo Griffin Archives.)
One of the things that appeals to me most about Refuge Farm is the sound of the night, which is to say, not much of it, except the barking of the dogs up the road and the sound of the trains.
I have resolved to stay out of the sickening mess here in Washington. It makes me crazy. Apparently it does the President, too. The proper way to address the budget cliff is to pack the dog and the girls and the wife on Air Force One and decamp for Kailua on the lovely island of O’ahu in the mid-Pacific.
According to the White House, the First Family will be out there from the 17th of December until the 6th of January. I am going to take this just as seriously, though I confess that I have no big jet on hot standby in case I feel the need to strike some grand bargain or another.
My bargains are likely to be much smaller. The politics are a little slower paced down in Culpeper. The big controversy is about the town seal. See, the Culpeper Minutemen were raised there under the big oak tree in 1775, and marched off to fight the Brits in Tidewater.
Their symbol was this:
Modern Town Fathers have decided this is too close to the Gadsden Flag, the one pre-empted by the Tea Party. They would like something more tourist friendly, but frankly, I have to say that the current one is about as welcoming as I want to be.
The Town Fathers say there are too many mottos on the Minuteman flag- they wind up as too small to read, but I feel that if you are close enough to read them, you are just too close.
The mournful whistle of the Amtrak sounds at the grade crossing over at Winston, the seat of the great estate that once occupied the acreage around Refuge Farm, and the echo of it carries across the fields and overgrown pastures.
I turn in bed, under the eiderdown, always reminded that my Irish forebears laid the original track of the Alexandria and Orange Railroad. That led, in time, to Gordonsville and the junction with the Fredericksburg & Gordonsville line, leading from Fredericksburg, via Orange Courthouse to Charlottesville, where it connects with the Chesapeake & Ohio R.R. and the way west.
I don’t know when the family made the big turn across the mountains, but the A&O started construction in 1850, two years after my Irish arrived in Alexandria. By 1861 the family, less my great great-great-grandfather (who perished under the summer sun swinging a hammer) was in Nashville, the great rail and river hub of the upper South.
And thence into the late unpleasantness between the States.
After encountering a stocky Union General named Ulysses Grant, Great Uncle Patrick’s unit was captured and his Colonel dispatched to a stint in the POW camp at Fort Warren, part of the island defenses of Boston after the defeat of the 10th Tennessee at Ft. Donelson.
Great-great-Uncle Patrick said this: “At Dover we helped to build Fort Donelson. Later, after the Sons of Erin became Company H, 10th Tennessee Infantry, we went down on the Tennessee River and built Fort Henry. At Fort Henry there was no whisky on our side of the river, but across the stretch of water was Madame Peggy’s saloon. There was some mystery as to where the beverage she sold was obtained, but this only added to her popularity.”
Better Madame Peggy’s than Fort Warren, but released on parole, the Irish were all ready to reorganize and get back in the fight.
I need to follow the tracks some time, down to Gordonsville and and see what they saw, walking south and then west. I would like to tour some of the places my Irish spent their time, 1861-65, in front of Vicksburg and at Shiloh, and Raymond, where Uncle Patrick cradled his dead Colonel.
I would like to see if Peggy’s place is still there, or at least a reasonable facsimile dive bar on the Rebel side of the river.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
In the Soup
(Mrs P’s opening holiday volley. She is a good neighbor and doesn’t yell much. Photo Socotra).
I had spied several trees trussed up within an inch of their lives atop SUVs coming back from Refuge Farm. The stores along Rt. 29 were all selling piney things, and it looked like the season was getting serious. Traffic was light, and I imagined the residents of Opal and Warrenton and Gainesville were staying close to home and decorating for Christmas.
After parking the Panzer in the garage, I took the elevator up to look at the Saturday mail- a task we won’t be doing much longer- and then went on to the 4th Floor to trudge down the corridor toward my unit. The weekend had been good and productive. Projects done. A one-floor living plan established at Refuge Farm with a nice and comfy bed and some of the junk moved out to make things flow better.
I was looking to finish editing the tribute issue of the magazine to account for Mac’s departure, but life got in the way again. Fumbling for the big key chain, I saw that Miss P across the hall had got a jump on my. Her wreath was affixed to the door-knocker, and I realized the opening salvo in the holiday wars had begun.
I put down my backpack and went to the front closet and found my wreath. There are strict regulations about how our plain beige doors may be decorated. Nothing may project into the corridor, and wreaths may only be hung on hangers that fit over the top of the door, or from the existing hardware. The Condo Board is hell on deviationists.
I looked up into the dim recesses of the closet. The miniature pine tree was next to it on the top shelf, next to the miniature hay-bale that should have gone with the pumpkin static display for the dining table. I took the two green fake piney-things down and left the hay for next fall.
(The Socotra response. Understated but elegant. Photo Socotra).
The wreath was a piece of cake- I got it at the Methodist Church shortly after the tides of fortune washed me up on the shores of Big Pink. I opened the door and wrapped the wire hanger around the knocker on the brass eagle on the door. Voila! Miss P’s opening volley was answered and nothing was projecting into the hall.
(Fa La La La, La. Photo Socotra.)
Then I carried the micro tree over to the dining table and picked up the pumpkin by the stem and replaced it with the mini-pine.
The lights were already up since I never took them down, and presto, the decorating was done for the season.
I carried the pumpkin like an orange bowling ball in the crook of my arm and wandered outside. It would be fun, I thought, to be completely irresponsible to drop it down the four floors to Big Tony’s patio on the first floor to make a satisfying “splat” on the concrete.
(Big Pink under refurbishment. Photo Socotra).
I enjoyed the thought for a moment, looking at the progress the restoration crew was making on the main wing of Big Pink’s Western Front. It is impressive, what the men have done. They are scouring the old white paint off the balconies and exposed concrete and dolling up the dusty-mauve brickwork, custom-selected by the legendary Francis Freed who first conceived the Continental style architecture of the building.
They are coming for me in the next wave, which means cleaning off the balcony to permit the ninja-workers to access the space and sand it down to bare concrete. Next week? I mused. Or will they stall out for the winter season?
The orange sphere in my arms was hefty, and I thought for a moment about the sound it would make, bouncing around the trash chute. Wait, I thought. “Waste not, want not.”
Dinner had to be accommodated, and why not make some pumpkin soup and bake it in the shell? And in preparation there would be all those wonderful pumpkin seeds. What the hell. ‘Twas the season, it was, and if the inside of the pumpkin was not rotted out, the exercise might be fun. It would be local food, too.
I cut a lid in the orange ball and sniffed suspiciously. It seemed fine. I scooped out the brains- the orange stringy tendril and a fine harvest of white oblong seeds.
I melted some fresh creamery butter and got out a cookie sheet and shook the moist seeds around in a little butter and garnished liberally with sea salt. I popped it in the oven at three fifty and started to make vegetable soup with some of the pureed pumpkin brains.
The seeds were nice and brown in twenty minutes, and I pulled them out to cool and cracked a beer after turning on the game. I nibbled on the seeds and watched enormous men crash into one another. When the celery, veggie broth, carrots, diced potatoes, onions and spices seemed to be about the right consistency, I drained the contents of the saucepan into the cavern in the pumpkin and popped it in the over at 325 for an hour.
When I began to smell something appealing, I pulled it out and ladled on some grated Pecorino Romano, a hard, hearty sheep’s milk cheese with origins in southern Italy but which came from Croftburn Farms.
When it had melted nicely, I pulled it out of the oven and sat down to dinner.
Damn, I thought. Great weekend. Not a single political thought.
Care for some soup?
If you care to try:
Ingredients:
One small pumpkin
Assorted veggies
Two 12oz cans of vegetable (or chicken) broth
Spices to taste
Pureed Pumpkin brains
Grated Pecorino Romano
Directions:
Lightly sauté the vegetables and spices. Add Pumpkin brains for color and texture. Throw in the contents of the cans of broth and bring to a simmer. Pour contents into emptied pumpkin shell while chomping on roasted pumpkin seeds. And think about whether or not a specific injunction on wine consumption during NFL games applies.
Watch large people put huge licks on one another, heedless of the possible implications of brain injury. When you smell something good coming from the kitchen, pull it out and add the grated cheese. Return to over and blast it under the broiler setting on “low.” Serve the pumpkin on a plate with fresh biscuits and creamery butter if you desire. Or not. Carbs are my enemy.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The District Commissioner
(England’s iconic John Bull is often joined by his mustachioed compatriot, Colonel Blimp. We were the same rank. Photo courtesy Amazon.)
I am up late this morning at the farm, and there is a reason for my slacking. I managed to get the bed set up in the back room and no longer have to navigate the stairs. I am not really back to anything like I used to be and it is a bit frustrating. I need to walk more and somehow find more hours in the day to do it.
(New pillow-top University Queen bed courtesy of Sleepy’s. Photo Socotra.)
It is like that this morning. In the darkness in the plush comfort of the pillow-top mattress and under the eiderdown I surfed through the issues of the day. When I rose and stumbled to the coffee maker, I realized the things to talk about this morning are legion. The airfield we are about to abandon at Lages is one; the Doha Climate Conference Fiasco is another; the bed and the farm collectively as a hedge against the times to come.
I will spare you the bile that comes with looking at the lunacy up in Washington. We will either go over the cliff or we will not, or perhaps better said, we will tumble over the edge and grasp a likely branch that may avert immediate disaster, though it will leave us hanging somewhere high in the air.
Laws of entropy and all that- what cannot be sustained, cannot. Therefore, something will happen to restore equilibrium. Britain did it- painfully, of course, but there is a template for great powers whose imperial robes now sag around a diminished frame.
I am of a libertarian bent, as you know, though a pragmatist in affairs in the wide world. You may have seen the news of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the soon-to-be-redundant Lages Air Field in the eastern Atlantic, which Mr. Panetta would scuttle in the budget disaster. I think it was upgraded to be one of the Shuttle alternate landing sites and hence is world class in length and amenities.
We used to fly space ships. Remember?
I know, I know. I sound like Colonel Blimp or something. But also remember the key role of Ascension Island in Britain’s conflict with Argentina in the Falklands? The Archies were just months off in their timing- the Royal Navy was about to shrink below the level necessary to sustain forces so far away, and the airfield on a spec of land in the mid-Atlantic was crucial to resupply the war effort.
Do the Chinese desire Lages? I don’t know, and increasingly I find myself with the querulous view of an old apparatchik- akin to Colonel Blimp or the District Commissioner retired from the back of beyond in the old Colonies.
You recall the type, though most have passed on. The role of the Commissioner in the old empire was akin to that of Governor, and has continued in some of the old colonies though naturally the faces have changed.
Remember the days when the Union Jack was coming down all around the world? The District Commissioner analogy does linger. I wonder how the legions of Commissioners must have felt, called home with the independence of their charges to a 90% tax and welfare structure in the UK in the 1960s?
Well, the Brits have survived, after a fashion, though the last decades have certainly had their challenges and the future appear problematic. When confronting a tough challenge, I always look back to the ideas conceived by the brains that won World War II.
When I see the global calculus changing, I look back to Britain for lessons regarding modern equivalents of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Of course, the Brits were actually turning their world over to a sometimes fractious and rebellious child- that is to say, us. I see none of those out there, only an inscrutable smiling faces of South and East Asia.
One of my better counselors said I was thinking like an old District Commissioner. He is of the opinion that the Chinese are screwed, too, the products of unbalanced demographics and a rapacious and implacable political system.
“We humans have the ability to imagine the future – however unclearly – and prepare for it,” he told me this morning. “I think our generation will be generally OK, so long as we can avoid being put on the Liverpool Care Pathway.”
I had to ask him about that, since the inner workings of the UK’s health management system are largely unknown to those of us who will emulate it. The Liverpool Care Path is the course of treatment equivalent to Hospice, and based on lack of resources, is the course of choice for the elderly and new-born alike.
Sort of scary, but that is to be expected if you are just back from a long time overseas. My friend ended his summary by saying: “It’s good advice to the youngsters that eludes me. What are they to do? How do they adapt and overcome?”
I would have to find a real District Commissioner to ask, and they are in short supply these days. In the meantime, I have to agree with my pal. I now have television in the Great Room, the last bastion of tranquility. I may not be commissioner of much, but this will have to do.
(The reinvigorated Great Room, with media inputs. Photo Socotra.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com
The Sexiest Man Alive
(Screen Shot of the People’s Daily English edition with Dear L’il Kim as Sexiest Man Alive. Images courtesy People’s Daily).
It is easy to get distracted these days. I have no idea what Mr. Geithner, the alleged Secretary of the Treasury, was thinking when he took the new plan to avoid the fiscal cliff up to Senate Minority Leader McConnell. Apparently the poker-faced Republican just laughed.
Sources at The Daily Socotra revealed that Mr. Tim Geithner proposed a two-step process to raise $1.6 trillion dollars in revenue. The first of these steps would raise $960 billion through higher taxes on upper earners, while another $600 billion would come from tax reform. The Secretary also apparently casually asked that Congress cede its Constitutional power of the purse- represented by the debt ceiling limit- to the Executive Branch.
It seems a little surreal, and I am not sure a lot of Senate Democrats thought it was a great idea either. But it doesn’t sound like anyone is getting serious, at least not yet. But I did note that the month apparently changed last night, and whatever the hell is going to happen after the first of the year it is getting closer.
Screw it, the election is over, this is what we got, and now we have to live with it. With all this going on- the President is back on the campaign trail for some reason best known to himself- it was easy to let other vital issues slide to the back-burner.
Like who the sexiest man alive is.
I hope you saw it. The Onion is a fun paper, gleefully irreverent on every topic of political life. They ran a satirical piece in which they named moon-faced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Eun the “sexiest man alive for 2012.” The PRC’s equivalent of The New York Times picked up the story. The People’s Daily missed the humor, and ran it in full in their online English version of the paper.
Through the miracle of the decadent capitalist internet, they also attached a slide show of more than fifty heroic images of the pudgy L’il Kim.
It was totally awesome. The official outlet of the Chinese Communist Party trumpeted The Onion’s award as completely legit, since everyone else looks at the Dear L’il Leader with a certain amount morbid fascination about what he will do next. Lately, there have been reports of senior DPRK defense officials dying in self-inflicted mortar firings and the like.
KCNA, the official news outlet of North Korea (the equivalent of the People’s Daily) announced that they have a Christmas present for us. They are planning on launching a long-range Unha-3 ballistic missile between the 10th and 22nd of this month. They screwed up the last attempt in April, apparently attempted by a crew of rocket scientists who have been replaced by mortar fire.
The ROKs to the south are having a presidential election or something on the 19th, a complete coincidence.
It is grand fun in the Hermit Kingdom, the antics of which never cease to amaze and astound.
But that wasn’t the only couple notes from the North. Apparently the USS Pueblo has gone missing.
Just to recap, Pueblo was captured in a sad bit of political violence in 1968. It was towed into Wonsan, a particularly bedraggled port just north of the MDL-X. That is the “military demarcation line- extended,” if you have not been following things, and there the matter rested for years and years.
In my time on the Peninsula, we imaged the ship from space regularly to monitor its status. The North Koreans turned it into “People’s Museum #5,” and the US stubbornly maintained Pueblo in active status- she currently is the third oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy, only behind USS Enterprise (CV-65) and Old Ironsides.
(Big E leaves active service today. More than a half-century of service as the first nuclear carrier, and the second oldest ship in the active inventory- until today. Photo USN)
Odd, since Pueblo will move up today when the Big E is transferred to the inactive fleet down in Tidewater today. Good run for her- 51 years of steaming in defense of the nation, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Operation ENDURING FREEDOM.
Anyway, I have already recounted my bile at the apparent lack of interest on the part of the Clinton Administration which naively thought the Pueblo might be returned- and with a bogus superstructure, the about-to-be second oldest ship in the US Navy was towed out of Wonsan and all the way around the Republic of Korea to the Northern Limit Line, into DPRK waters, up the Taedong River and given a prominent berth in Pyongyang. She has been there since October of 1999.
Oh well.
We apparently are not following Pueblo any closer this week than we did in 1999. She has gone missing. A company specializing in the burgeoning tourist business, Koryo Tours, discovered the disappearance after employees returned from a trip.
It is entirely possible the ship is under renovation at the Fatherland Liberation Museum, or something stranger is in progress.
Secretary of State Madeline Albright could not get her back. Senator Wayne Allard tried and failed. There is current a letter-writing campaign by a fellow named Rick Rogala in Sarasota, FL, to ask for her return. Rick is a former Puelbo Seaman Apprentice from that awful and humiliating incident. He says he can have no closure until Pueblo is home.
I wish him well on his attempt, and who knows? You never can tell what the North Koreans are up to, and the Dear L’il Leader is still a wild card in a wild deck.
A White House delegation- representing the real sexiest man alive- apparently was in Pyongyang last summer to ask them not to mess around with the ROK elections. The scheduled missile launch would suggest that element was a failure. But you never can tell.
It could be a prelude to the return of the Second Oldest Ship in the US Navy.
I won’t hold my breath, but I would like to see it. Heck, I would even vote for Kim as the sexiest man alive for real if it would help. Anyone got a stamp?
(Welcome aboard, Sailor! DPRK guide at People’s Museum #5. Photo Koryo Tours.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com