{"id":29363,"date":"2011-01-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-28T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/2011\/01\/28\/1442\/"},"modified":"2011-01-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-28T02:00:00","slug":"what-the-postman-brings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/what-the-postman-brings\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Postman Brings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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What the Postman Brings<\/strong> <\/p>\n


(Gladys Horton as a teen. Photo Getty Images.)
\u00a0
I would rather think about the musical legacy of Gladys Horton, the lead singer of the Marvelettes who charted the first of the MoTown hits when I was just beginning to think about things beyond my grade school, and who made Detroit famous for something other than cars. She died yesterday at a Sherman Oaks, CA., nursing home where she was recovering from the effects of a stroke. I heard \u201cHey, Mr. Postman\u201d as part of her obit and cannot get it out of my mind.
\u00a0

\u00a0
I was going to tell you a story about Vietnam today. There is some stuff going down there that is worth talking about, and I have a couple really good recipes that I need to walk you through while we are still making lists for the store to stock up for the Superbowl.
\u00a0
Oh well, we live in the world we do, and here goes. I am pretty sure there will be an Internet tomorrow, at least here, even if the Strong Guy that rules Egypt has taken his nation off the net.
\u00a0
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Cairo this morning, following similar riots in Sana, capital of Yemen yesterday. That is among the poorest of Arab states, and Cairo is the largest.
\u00a0
Secular and Islamist Egyptian opposition leaders supported large-scale protests after prayers on Friday. The Authorities responded first by shutting down the social media sites, the Blackberry network and finally the Internet itself on Wednesday, but the word had already been passed to the street.
\u00a0
In this technical age, it is a breathtaking demonstration of ham-handed resolve on the part of the government. Forcing the revolution to communicate by mailman won\u2019t put the lid on it, any more than the truncheons and rubber bullets and water cannons the used against the demonstrators. The cops even doused the man of the hour, Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei.


<\/strong>(Former Atomic Energy Commission Chair ElBaradei. Photo Wikipedia.)
\u00a0
He is a cultured guy, a man of the world, so if he is to be the Man on Horseback, maybe that presages some positive outcome. But I don\u2019t know. We will have to see whether is the real deal of another charlatan.
\u00a0
I had a brief chat with a colleague emeritus from the Air Force who was around for the installation of the generally friendly despots who have ruled each country with firm, if not brutal, hands for the last three decades.
\u00a0
The Colonel remembered what happened in Yemen, long ago.
\u00a0

(President almost-for-life Saleh of Yemen. Photo NY Daily News.)
\u00a0
\u201cI remember when Saleh became President,\u201d He said. \u00a0\u201cI was part of a small American party that visited Sanaa from the European Command HQ in Stuttgart. \u00a0My boss, Major General Ed Partain, USA, led our group. We had just set up an Office of Military Cooperation which working for the Ambassador, provided the staffing for the Security Assistance program. \u00a0The US had just given a half dozen F-5 aircraft to Yemen, and the aircraft were to be the stars of their annual military demonstration day.\u201d
\u00a0
He looked off to a distance I could not see.
\u00a0
\u201cThe Soviets were there to include their Ambassador and a senior General; I sat across from the Ambassador at lunch and he looked and acted like Khrushchev – a true member of the Proletariat.\u201d The Colonel smiled ironically.
\u00a0
\u201cThe rumor was that prior to his becoming President, Saleh had two jobs, one as a Major in the Yemeni Army in the morning and then drove a taxi in the afternoons. And of course at “cocktail hour”, the entire male population sat around and chewed qat (khat), enjoying it’s narcotic affect – which they still do.\u201d
\u00a0
I nodded. \u201cIt is endemic to the culture,\u201d I agreed. \u201cAnd don\u2019t plan on getting anything except mischief done after lunch.\u201d
\u00a0
The Colonel laughed. \u201cIt was also about that time,\u201d he said, \u201cmaybe a year earlier, that I visited Egypt on their Armed Forces day and sat in a reviewing stand in which Anwar Sadat was the presiding official. \u00a0It was in this stand exactly one year later that he was assassinated in 1981. That is what produced Hosni Mubarak.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cI visited the same spot in 1989,\u201d I said. \u201cI have a picture of it somewhere,\u201d gesturing at the pile of albums and data discs littering my desk.
\u00a0
\u201cWhat goes around,\u201d said the Colonel. \u201cI told you the other day that democracy may not be the universal good news answer for our national security, but that is what we have been peddling for the last several Administrations, and we are stuck with it.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cSo we trade security for our ideals and reap the consequences of what is going to sweep into the vacuum left by the departure of the strong men.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cPresident Obama\u2019s tepid defense of Hosni Mubarak is eerily like Jimmy carter\u2019s lukewarm support for the Shah of Iran during the return of the Ayatollah. You will recall what followed.\u201d
\u00a0
I nodded slowly, wondering what exactly is going to come next. \u00a0With Gladys gone, and the Internet cut off, I guess we will just have to wait for the Postman and see what he has in his sack.
\u00a0
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
vicsocotra.com<\/a> | Subscribe to the RSS feed!<\/a><\/em> <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the Postman Brings (Gladys Horton as a teen. Photo Getty Images.) \u00a0 I would rather think about the musical legacy of Gladys Horton, the lead singer of the Marvelettes who charted the first of the MoTown hits when I was just beginning to think about things beyond my grade school, and who made Detroit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}