It was Labor Day in the United States, falling of course on the first Monday in September.
On this Monday, the German government announced that all Jews within the confines of the territory controlled by it, at home or conquered, were required to wear yellow Stars of David.
German poster declaring that "Whoever wears this badge is an enemy of our people."
The barbarity of this action can hardly be imagined today. It marked the wearer as somebody to be subject to public scorn merely for his religion, or ethnicity, and ultimately it would mark them for death.
The yellow badge seems to date as far back as the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate in the early 8th Century and have been subsequently revived and kept in force for centuries as a means of marking Jews living within the caliphates control. Both Christians and Jews were subject to repressive religious laws within Muslim territories, and indeed in some Muslim countries today being an open Christian is extremely risky, and conversion from Islam, although widely occurring, illegal. Clothing requirements were in fact expanded beyond this to include other features.
Having said that, the practice of requiring Jews, and Muslims, to wear distinct clothing also expanded to Christian countries by the 13th Century, although with a different concern in mind. As has been dealt with here elsewhere, originally marriage did not require a Priest to officiate and could be privately contracted in a fairly informal manner. There were concerns in the 1200s that Christians and non Christians were falling into sexual relations that gave rise to invalid marriages in a hasty fashion, and therefore clothing requirements were imposed so that couples in the heat of the moment might be aware that they were going where they couldn't legally go and contracting what would have been regarded as invalid marriages.
The Germans, of course, were readopting the practice in order to make the Jews despised "others". It was resisted in some occupied areas, such as Denmark, where non Jews took up wearing them as well, and in occupied areas of Catholic Czechoslovakia the authorities had to ban hat tipping to those wearing them, where the residents had taken it up as a sign of respect to the victims.
On the same day, Leningrad came within German artillery range.
The Canadians began to accept enlistments for the Canadian Army Women's Corps. Of note, the day prior the British had deployed women in mixed gender anti-aircraft units in the UK, a rare example of women in a Western Allied military having a combat role in the war.
The United States assumed responsibility for Atlantic convoys from Newfoundland to Iceland. This was undoubtedly an example of direct participation in the war, even though the United States had not yet declared war.
The Soviet Union murdered retired Estonian military commander Karl Parts.
Parts had served in the Imperial Russian Army but had gone over to his native Estonia upon its separation from Russia. He'd served against the German Freikorps and the Reds there, but had retired in 1925 and was a farmer thereafter. The Soviets took him into custody in 1940 when they invaded the country and then murdered him on this day. He was 55 years old.
President Roosevelt delivered a Labor Day address in which he stated that American labor bore the responsibility of winning World War Two.
KYW-TV, the first US television station outside of New York City, went on the air in Philadelphia. It's still on the air there.
Ted Williams appeared on the cover of Life Magazine.
And it also turns out she's going into streaming services, which would suggest that she'll appear via the Internet, not via television.
If all of this is correct it means that Hunt is gambling and CNN is betting that streaming via the Internet is the future of news, not cable TV. It's a bold move for hunt.
On this day in 1941 a Federal photographer was photographing defense housing in Marrimack Park, Virginia. You can tell which photographer it is by the fact that one of them consistently could never fully focus his camera. Perhaps it was his equipment, but the photos are always out of focus.
Defense housing. Merrimack Park, Norfolk, Virginia. This project to house married enlisted personnel of the Norfolk naval base has 500 units which include single-story detached dwellings, two family houses, two-story group houses and apartments. Built at a cost of $1,980,000 by the US
Defense housing. Merrimack Park, Norfolk, Virginia. Enlisted housing.
On the same day, the British took took the Syrian location of Palmyra.
British troops in Palmyra.
The battle featured mechanized British cavalry, and the Arab Legion, which would become famous post war in regard to the early Arab Israeli conflicts. The location was inhabited since vastly ancient times, but was abandoned in 1932.
A press photographer photographed a convalescent home for British officers. One of the photos appears here:
Lady MacMichael, at the Knights of St. John's Br. Red Cross, convalescent house for officers.
The Germans and Finns were also advancing, in the northernmost front of the war. They jointly commenced Operation Arctic Fox, which aimed to capture Murmansk. The operation would run until November, and fall short of its goal.
That failure was significant, as was the Finnish participation in the effort to seize the port. The seizure would have choked off Allied supplies from that port, one of the most significant routes to the Red Army by sea.
The Vichy French government froze Soviet assets in France.
The Germans killed a small number of Polish academics and their families in Lwow, a targeted strike against the Polish intellectual community. The death tole was 25, small in comparison to the number of people being executed elsewhere, but its still significant nonetheless.
British troops wearing pith helmets and carrying SMLEs outside of Baghdad, 1941.
On this day in 1941, fighting between Iraqi insurgents who had recently staged a coup and taken over the country, and the British, started in earnest. What is sometimes called the Anglo Iraqi War commenced on this day with British bombing raids on Iraqi air assets.
The entire Iraq episode would prove to be a sort of sideshow in the war, but perhaps one that should have gathered more attention at the time as it showed the practical limits of Axis' power. Iraqi plotters had figured that the British were proving to be down and out. In turn, the British would prove to have ample forces to deal with Iraq, even if those forces often looked more like they were out of World War One than World War Two. The Axis, on the other hand, proved basically incapable of aiding their would be Iraqi allies.
The war would last until May 31, with the British, as noted, emerging victorious.
Romania formed a bureaucratic organization to expropriate Jewish property from Romanian Jews and to redistribute it to non Jewish Romanians. Oppression of the Jews was a feature of the Romanian fascist state that ran the country until near the end of World War Two but it was home grown, rather than imported from the Nazis, as it was in some other nations. Romania, of course, was a German ally for most of the war.
German functionaries met on this day in 1941 to make economic plans for the occupation of the Soviet Union. Those plans included seizure of food resources for importation into Germany with the resulting acknowledged starvation of large numbers of Soviet citizens.
The FCC took steps to start the licensing of the first ten commercial television stations in the U.S.
It's a huge container ship, stuck sideways in the Suez Canal.
There has to be a moment, when you are piloting something like this, in this situation, when you think "oh pooh".
The owner of the ship has apologized. But, while no doubt sincere, there's something odd about that.
Perhaps my neighbor down the street who routinely abandons a car in snow days will learn some lesson about this.
The stuck ship has been the subject of an endless number of memes and jokes, but it actually is impacting world commerce. 10% of the globes trade goes through it, and there are now concerns about toilet paper and coffee prices.
A debate on arms
M231 Port Firing Weapon, a fairly short lived machinegun variant of the M16 that was designed for firing from ports of armored personnel carriers. The concept was short lived, although some are still retained for Bradly AFV crews. The layout is closer to the AR 556 than to any common M16 or AR15.
I thought about not commenting about this at all, and when I started this most recent edition to this thread it wasn't here, as that was prior to an insane man's assault on a grocery store in Colorado. But as this is now prominent in the Zeitgeist, the history of this blog would provide for commenting in some form, so I'll do it here.
First, the rush to conclusion.
At the point at which I'm typing this out, we still don't know much about the assault other than its tragic consequences. Both sides in the gun control debate are rushing to conclusions, which means the conclusions will largely be pre made ones rather than any which are the product of analysis. What we do know is this.
The killer was insane and had a history of violence. He was short tempered and paranoid. His condition appears to be progressive, and while he was violent in high school, he wasn't constantly so.
He was born in Syria, but brought to the country as an infant, so he can't really be considered to be a Syrian migrant in the conventional sense. This is somewhat relevant, however, in that neighbors of his household report that the family lived in a style that's more familiar to immigrants of earlier eras in that it was multigenerational, something common in many places but odd to Americans. This isn't particularly relevant to anything other than that, according to one report, living next to the family was a bit of a nightmare in some ways as they sort of spilled out into the street in an unruly fashion. So, basically, he lived in a large and somewhat unruly setting. To the extent that matters, if it does, it would be because living in his family would make a person an outsider simply because of the very non American style of life in an otherwise middle class neighborhood.
He is Muslim but this can't be said to have an obvious tie to Islamic extremism.
Indeed, he simply seems to have gone progressively insane. Members of his family who have been interviewed noted this.
He was convicted of third degree assault in 2018 and sentenced to 48 hours of community service.
All this should serve to diffuse any suggestion that this has anything to do with his ethnicity, although I'm sure on some quarters of the net, it's not viewed that way.
On this, while the press reports have concluded that his purchase of firearms was legal, it's not immediately apparent that this is in fact the case. It would depend on the nature of the conviction, but frankly I'd lean towards his purchase actually having been illegal. If this is the case, the background check system failed to reveal the conviction. Having said that, I'm not firmly attached to that position. This may be such a "simple assault", i.e., fighting, that it wouldn't register. If that's the case, the background system didn't fail. We should assume here it didn't fail.
The firearm used in the event was a Ruger AR-556 pistol.
The AR-556 "pistol" is one of a series of arms produced to dodge the National Firearms Act on short barreled rifles. There's no doubt about this and while somebody no doubt will eventually log in to state otherwise, this recent trend serves no other purpose. This has allowed for the manufacture of very short barreled rifles, marketed pretextually as pistols, and also semi automatic replicas of submachineguns which would otherwise be illegal under US law. This is part of the trend we've noted here before of the AR lead militarization and pseudo militarization (tacti-cool) that has become so prominent in the US.
Indeed, the problem with weapons like the AR-556 pistol is that they make it exceedingly difficult for defenders of firearms to do just that. While fans of the AR15 in general can point to legitimate sporting use for the rifle, finding a real sporting use for a pistol variant of it is extremely difficult to do. Everyone knows that the configuration is simply a dodge around the law. A fan of pistols would be better off with a real pistol, a person who wanted a semi automatic carbine variant of the AR can find one easily. The "pistol" configuration really appeals to a limited market that is buying it mostly based on appearance. This is all less true for collectors who want something like a firing replica of something like the MP40 in semiautomatic, but even there, because the MP40 is a purely military arm, it gets difficult to really make the argument. That puts defenders of the Second Amendment in a difficult position as even the defense argument that can be made has to really yield to an offensive argument. I.e., you can't easily argue you need a AR-556 for self defense. You can argue it, but you'll always be faced with an argument about a conventional pistol being a better choice.
As added factor that's been discussed is that Boulder recently attempted to ban "assault" weapons, but the ban was struck down as unconstitutional.
So what does that immediately tell us?
1. The killer is almost certainly insane.
2. He lived with his family, so not institutionalization occurred that would have alerted anyone.
3. The firearm was purchased legally.
4. The firearm is a type that's principal appeal is simply its strange looks. While the description will not doubt be "military style", in fact it is not, unless the briefly manufactured armored vehicle port guns are considered, which did pretty closely resemble this sort of weapon.
So what can we draw from that?
Perhaps not much.
Democrats are crying for the passage of gun control bills that will make it through the House, but they won't make it through the Senate. The bill with the broadest support, expanding background check to include all firearms, would not have impacted this whatsoever. This purchased passed the background check and would have passed the proposed expanded one.
More radical measures, such as banning "assault weapons" would have precluded the sale of the AR556 in question. That can be noted. Having said that, there's no reason to believe that a man in this mental condition wouldn't have simply switched to something else. Indeed, no matter how expansive you make such a "ban", it would fail to ban everything that somebody like this would employ. So that would do nothing.
Having said that, in the case of these "pistols" that are now in this category, here actually is something that those who are wondering what can be done by way of Executive Order fits that bill. This is only a "pistol" by regulatory interpretation, and its a strained one at that. The ATF could be directed to reclassify these as long guns as they have features which are overwhelming only appropriate for long guns. That would subject them all to the NFA overnight, which would make the simple retail of them nearly impossible and subject future transfers of them to the NFA. Indeed, it 'd make the current owning of them subject to NFA requirements.
That would address the arm, but it also wouldn't address the killing.
And frankly, in this particular case, only a massively expanded mental healthy system in the US which reincorporated compulsory institutionalization, and indeed expanded it beyond any scope it ever had, would have prevented this. That isn't going to happen either and it certainly isn't going to happen in an era in which there's a Democratic Congress.
Which means, once again, probably the only real solution, and its imperfect in the case of the insane, is societal. Not all evil can be prevented.
Indeed, what this might tell us is something simply about ignoring evil and the violent, but we've always tended to do that. We constantly read of criminals who commit some horrific act who have a past history of violence, or of people who have no major criminal past but a distinct demonstrated attraction to it. It's clear the mental health treatment available in the US is lacking, but at the same time even if it were much more extensive, we'd likely not catch something like this. We'd have to have a much more stable, and probably agrarian, society in order to address much of that, and even then, we wouldn't catch it all.
And that would, I suppose, involve a society that prayed for not being lead into temptation, and to be delivered from evil, but I don't see that coming on any time soon.
Poor Joe Manchin
Joe Manchin, one of the few conservative Democrats left on the planet, is suddenly constantly in the spotlight.
The reason that his is, is because as a conservative Democrat, he's suddenly a power broker simply by occupying a position on the political map that used to be one that was crowded, the middle ground. Democrats can't really get things through the Senate unless he supports it.
This came up in the context of gun control, as Manchin doesn't support any of the two bills that have passed the House. This called left wing brat, Rachel Maddow, whose style is mostly 100% pure snark to lambast him and accuse him of falling down in front of the "nearly dissolved" NRA.
The NRA is in bankruptcy, but it's far from nearly dissolved. What will happen to it remains to be seen, but the widespread assumption that its now powerless is pretty presumptive. It's goals are still shared by large number of voters and as a practical matter its influence in the past has been so extensive that it may outlast its current decrepit leadership that needs to go.
Be that as it may, Manchin is actually a supporter of some gun control and recently sponsored his own background check bill. He has a "D" rating from the NRA.
Maddow, the loudmouthed smart aleck kid in the junior high class we all remember from those days, probably didn't know that.
This is part of the problem with debates such as this, for the reason noted in our first entry. Arguing that gun control that could realistically be imposed in the US would have prevented this is a lot like arguing that Hitler wouldn't have committed mass atrocities if only more people had bought his art. The logic train is derailed on it.
And then there's the states
The Flight, Frederic Remington.
At the same time that the Democratic Congress and Administration is seeking to impose gun control, state legislatures all over are attempting to do the opposite, including going so far as to pass obviously unconstitutional statutes.
Wyoming is taking a run at one which, even though its been taken to the weed whacker to the extent that its original drafter, the alt right Wyoming Senator Anthony Bouchard, no longer supports it, pretty clearly violates the Supremacy Clause. Lots of these statutes do. The only one I've seen that may not is one that has been suggested in, I think, South Carolina which simply proposes to make all the residents of the state members of the militia.
Indeed, that's the cleverest approach I've seen so far. I haven't read the bill, but there's some logic to a bill that makes everyone a member of the militia and all their arms part of their militia service. It's grounded in the U.S. Constitution, rather than giving it the middle finger salute like so many of these other bills do.
Irrespective of that, the really interesting thing is that the national legislature is going one way while state ones are going another. That tells us this really is a coastal issue, with some lefty islands dominated by urban areas. That makes any action on this that those on the left, and even the center left, imagine, pretty much impossible.
But it's not only that. We're not only politically polarized. We're now geographically polarized. And heavily.
The Intelligent quarter riots.
Dr. Oz faces backlash ahead of 'Jeopardy' gig, called a 'disgrace' to Alex Trebek's legacy
So read a headline in the net entertainment news, which I read even though I normally don't, having followed the link from Twitter.
I'm among those who find having Dr. Oz on Jeopardy irritating. He claims to have been a friend of the late Alex Trebek, which he may have been, but he's also a quack.
Will Jenny McCarthy be next?
As a total aside, maybe we can hope for Kate Upton. I'm serious on that. She's photogenic, as was Trebek, and by all accounts is highly intelligence, and doesn't sell snake oil. She's also sort of disappeared off of the cheesecake circuit now that she's a married woman and a mother.
Anyway you look at it the fact that Jeopardy fans are upset by Oz is a good thing and shows that even in some quarters of the vast wasteland, there are reservoirs of intelligence.
Breaking news
The late Mary Tyler Moore in 1978.
The BBC reported on March 25 that Mary Tyler Moore had died. It was due to a technical glitch.
Which is correct, she died in 2017.
Money and universities
Isaac Royall, Jr., one of the founders of Harvard law and a man with connections to slavery.
Jeffrey Epstein, it turns out, had connections to several universities. One professor has now lost his position due to this, as he basically facilitated the Epstein connection.
Well, whatever Epstein's connection with universities may have been, it was probably just money. That doesn't tell us much other than that universities need money, and that universities are particularly prone to retroactive self righteousness. They have the money, he's dead, they ought to just leave it at that, absent some suggestion of actual impropriety by members of their staff or that he somehow influenced their work.
If anything, what this ought to tell us is something about money and universities. Within the past couple of years we've had the "scandals" about bribed admissions, more or less, into well regarded schools by entertainment figures for their children. This is no surprise to anyone really familiar with universities. And then there's been the flap on the East Coast about the early founders of universities having made lots of money on slavery, which is indeed bad, but they're all dead now.
Absent all universities being government funded, which has its own problems, this sort of thing will occur. University funding is a big topic in the US right now, but nobody is really close to figuring it out and the left wing "make it all free" solution wouldn't address this and would devalue university educations further. Mostly what this is an example of is societal hypocrisy. We know that universities take money from donors, this isn't new. The money is already spent, leave it at that.
Hunt, whose first MSNBC show Kasie DC just wrapped up, and whose second Way Too Early just started, is a good, effective, reporter, and doesn't come across as a partisan chihuahua on crack like Chuck Todd does on television election nights, or as a completely unhinged biased partisan as he does on Meet the Press, not that Todd lets her get very many words in edgewise (which, I'll note, brings an effective slight sneer from Hunt, which she's really good at).
NBC. Send Todd to a well deserved rest. Given Hunt Meet the Press.
So, on this night when so many are glued to their televisions, and some to their radios, and many to the net, it's worth noting on our historically minded page that this is a new thing.
A century ago only the audiences of a single radio station in the US tuned in for live coverage of the General Election. And it wasn't that live. Even though Harding won a land slide the newspapers of that day. . . and the next, didn't have the winner, only a projection.
I don't know that this was different following FDR's 1932 election, but it probably was. Even at that however, a lot of people didn't really know who had won elections until the following morning newspapers.
Television has changed all of that, and with it, our expectancies.
I have no first hand recollection of the Perry Mason television show which ran from 1957 to 1966. of course, when it went off the air in 1966, I was three years old. Still, I know that it ran in syndicated reruns but I never watched it for more than a few minutes, and it always appeared rather boring. To a kid, it probably would have been. I didn't know until recently that the Mason character was based on a series of books that first came out in 1933.
I know that now as HBO has put out a new Perry Mason series that just premiered this year. This entry is a review of that series, not the television series.
Still, because the television series is so famous, it's not really possible to deal with the new HBO series without dealing with the tv series, and indeed, the HBO series basically acknowledges that. Taking off before the legendary Los Angeles trial lawyer's career is supposed to have started, Mason is uniquely suited for this treatment as apparently lawyer, turned author, Earl Stanley Gardner, never bothered to fill in the background details of his character. In very early novels, apparently, some slight clues to Mason's past were inserted, but that's about it. In later ones, people just took it for granted that Mason was a solo practitioner super trial lawyer with a strong investigative streak and didn't look for more.
If that seems odd, modern television shows often don't offer more than that either. Some do, but many do not.
Anyhow, there were a huge number of Perry Mason novels written by Gardner, followed by movies, and then ultimately the television series, all set in the time in which they were written or filmed.
HBO's series takes the opposite approach, putting the character back into the early 1930s in the depth of the Great Depression, just as prohibition is about to end, and introduces us to a disaffected, not yet lawyer, Mason played by Matthew Rhys. It's done brilliantly.
Rhy's Mason isn't yet the super lawyer. Rather, he's a Depression era dairy farmer turned private detective. He's also way down on his luck. An air strip is crowding his farm, which is down to two cows. His family has left him. He's a heavy drinker who has a "blue discharge" (a discharge that simply discharged from the service, usually given due to morals charges that weren't developed) from the Army in World War One. He's suffering from PTSD, as we'd now term it, and early on we learn why.
He's working for an elderly Los Angeles lawyer who has practiced a bit beyond his mental acuity who is assisted by an extremely able Della Street (Juliet Rylance). The series takes us to a complicated story involving the kidnapping and murder of an infant in which the mother is accused. I'll not get into the plot beyond that except to note that the plot informs us on how Mason becomes a lawyer.
The entire season one (there will not be at least a season two) is excellently done. The plot is extraordinarily complicated but not so much that it's impossible to follow. Fans of Foyle's War will find a similar approach in that regard except that the pacing is blisteringly fast (I actually had to watch a couple of the episodes twice in order to figure out what was going on with all of them). Like Foyle's War the series has a sense of reality about it which is achieved in part by either making reference to actual events of the time. The Ludlow Massacre is a frequent and surprising reference. The Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) subplot draws loosely on an actual California female evangelist of the period. A fan of history will catch these references but the non student of history doesn't need to know of them to view the series. Still, such details is unusual and captivating for a history fan.
One thing that I should note is that, like Babylon Berlin, set in a similar time period (1920s Germany) the HBO series isn't shy about nudity at all, and likewise it's really gritty in its portrayal. Prostitution is a feature of both series but in Perry Mason its given a really dark unattractive edge it deserves. Indeed, while nudity and sexual portrayals occur throughout the film, much of the nudity in Perry Mason is far from erotic. Parents, however, should be cautious and likely not let younger people watch the series.
On material details, the show is excellent. The early 1930s, which is a lot of ways harkened back to the late 1920s, is well depicted and no errors were detected. The racism of the period is well dealt with.
An oddity of the show, although not an enormous distraction in it, is the unusual focus on homosexuality. Della Street, who appeared in the television series as Mason's assistant, shows up in this series as well, in her early days as the assistant of E. B. Jonathan, the older lawyer that Mason is working for. In the television series viewers were always left wondering if there was a romantic relationship between Street and Mason that was just under the surface, and viewers here might somewhat wonder if that's a possibility in future episodes as well, but here Street's character is really developed and we learn that she's a well educated woman in a homosexual relationship with another woman. The story line isn't necessary for the plot, but it isn't a huge distraction either. We also learn, however, that Mason has a "blue discharge" from the Army, in which he was a World War One era captain, and it's hinted at that it was for a homosexual act, although we know that he's been married and has a son. We also learn in the series that Ivy League educated future District Attorney (he's an Assistant DA here) is also a homosexual.
The list of characters above does indicate, we should note, that fans of the 1950s/60s television who will recognize some characters, but they may not be identically portrayed. Street, in this HBO series, may be on her way to becoming a lawyer. Burger is on his way to becoming the DA. Paul Drake was apparently an investigator for Mason in the series, and we are introduced to him here, but he's an African American in the HBO series, which is critical to the plot.
Probably the only thing that the series could be criticized for is a loose treatment of courtroom procedure from time to time (but not consistently), but all in all, it actually does better with that than most legal dramas.
I have a Twitter account that really just serves as an advertisement for this site.
I don't know that a person should feel proud of that. Twitter is really stupid. And one thing that having a Twitter account does is expose you to the really superficial Zeitgeist of the moment. . . every day.
When I checked in this morning a big Twitter story is that Jimmy Fallon was apologizing for a Saturday Night Live appearance he did in black face a decade or so ago. I'm not going to look that up, but Fallon is an entertainer and Saturday Night Live has been bad for decades. Black face should have gone out before it came in, but as this apparently has been around for a really long time, blowing up about it now seems a bit late. Perhaps it might just be better to note that Saturday Night Live should be Exhibit A in the trial of the People v. Harvard Lampoon Not Being Funny.
Indeed, if that trial were to occur, one of the primary expert witnesses would have to be a sociologist on the topic of how, at any one time, alleged comedic geniuses are such only by societal acknowledgement, as many of them are truly never funny. Charlie Chaplin is a good example. Not funny. Not even once.
Chaplin. Not funny.
In the category of funny is Kathy Griffin, who is also blowing up Twitter today for a comment she said about injecting President Trump with air.
Griffin is occasionally funny. I didn't hear the comment but it doesn't strike me as funny. It also doesn't strike me as something that serious people need to waste much air time on.
President Trump for his part ought to stay off of Twitter, but was on complaining that Michelle Obama had gone golfing at the same time that he, Trump, is taking flak for golfing.
I don't golf and it strikes me as boring. I realize that not everyone feels that way. My mother was a superb golfer when young and taught me how to golf as a child. It didn't take.
Rants about golfing, by whomever is making them, are really about something else. Americans of both parties like to complain that the President is insensitive and lazy whenever he's seen not doing something that seems to be work. Democrats are complaining about Trump golfing as its an opportunity to complain about Trump. Republicans complained about Obama golfing while he was President for the same reason.
Driving by the golf course every morning I always look out upon it, but not because I like golf, but because I'm hoping the foxes will be back.
This year, it seems, Mr. and Mrs. Fox have chosen to have their brood elsewhere. So, instead, I see that Americans are out golfing.
Well, at least that's being out, which seems to me to be okay. The argument that we should shelter in our basements for the rest of eternity doesn't seem to me to be a sound one. I get it, if you are in the former cow pasture that New Yorkers now call Central Park there's going to be a lot of people, as New York is crowded, and you ought to be careful and wear a mask. And that advice goes for other places as well, and I'm not saying otherwise.
I'm just not too worked up about the golfing.
Or Griffin.
Billie Eilish is apparently worked up about body shaming which caused a lot of people to engage in virtue signaling by supporting her for being against body shaming.
This is in some ways associated, I think, with a song (I think) in which the words "not my fault" appear" somewhere where she decries people who have judged her based on her clothing or appearance. I'm not in that category as, perhaps to my discredit, I don't really care about Eilish at all, other than she's pretty clearly an object of fascination for being a certain sort of teenage/twentysomething idol in the same way that James Dean was, whom I also am pretty disinterested in.
What are you rebelling against?
What have you got?
M'eh.
Eilish has been the subject of a lot of fascination because she wears bulky clothes. In the video for her comments, song or whatever it is, she apparently strips down to a tank top in reaction to being the subject of a lot of fascination about what her wearing bulky clothing may mean.
The problem with that is that its almost guaranteed that a lot of her juvenile, and probably not so juvenile, fans will stop in to see the video not to bond with her statement, but because now they get to find out what she looks like under those threads. It's sort of like protests here and there in which women go topless, but not nearly as extreme. The message gets mixed.
That gets into the topic of decent clothing, of which there's an entire cul de sac on the web where people rage on that topic, some with really extreme views. It's a tough topic to engage in, in regard to women, as standards applying to female dress change every few seconds, or so it seems. Having said that, if you dress really oddly it tends to be the case that, no matter what you're saying, you're doing it to draw attention, in which case some of the attention will be unwelcome. Eilish may deserve credit for slamming body shaming, but simply dressing in a less "look at how oddly I'm dressed" fashion right from the onset would probably have accomplished that more effectively. Well, her video probably doesn't hurt. . . except to the extent juvenile males are checking into it the same way that they check into Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions.
All of which brings us back to this. In this era of COVID 19 introspection, American culture, as reflected on Twitter, isn't looking too great.
On May 1, 1970, US troops entered Cambodia in Operation Rock Crusher. The operation sent the 1st Cavalry Division, which was famously air mobile in Vietnam, i.e., "air cavalry", the 11th Armored Cavalry REgiment, the ARVN 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment and the ARVN 3d Airborne Brigade into Cambodia following a massive B-52 air strike.
Engineers of the 11th ACR sweeping for mines ahead of a M551 Sheridan.
And that's what I remember.
It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade. Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection. I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older. Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.
In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to. I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory. Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.
Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old. So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970. In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.
We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.
Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth. My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.
That's interesting in a way as over time there's come to be a genera of literature that reflects childhood memories of war, and mostly of World War Two. And when I say that, I mean American memories. Europeans and Asians who were 6 or 7 definately have memories of World War Two as there wasn't a square inch of Europe that wasn't impacted by the war. Even lands where a German jackboot never set foot, or where Japanese infantry never trod, were heavily impacted directly by the war. The British were bombed and sent their children, if they could, to the countryside. Swedes lived on short rations, pinned into between the Germans in occupying Norway and the war raging on the Finnish/Soviet border. Swiss rations in the neutral nation became so short that serious worries over starvation set in and commons gardening became common. And of course if you were in an area where ground forces contested for ground or even occupied it the events were unforgettable.
But in the United States none of that occured and so the memories are of other things. But they are there. Films like Radio Days and the like by some really well known actors depict the era and what it was like to be in the various stages of being young. Even Gene Shepherd's A Christmas Story touches on it a bit, with Shepherd setting his Yuletide recollections forward in time, as he was actually that age several years prior himself, during the Depression. Shepherd served in World War Two.
Of course, Shepherd's A Christmas Story might in fact be the most accurate depiction for a young person, the way they perceive remote events. Set in 1940, the kids worry about Christmas gifts and school yard bullies, not the Germans having just invaded France. Likewise, in 1968, 69 and 70, when I was first in school, we didn't worry about the Republic of Vietnam. We didn't even discuss it in school.
When I entered grade school, and through the early years of it, the day had a pretty set routine.
My father left for work really early, often before I was up. Back then he got up around 5:00, which seemed really early, but now I get up no later that, and often a lot earlier than that, myself. In my very early grade school years my mother sometimes made me breakfast but a lot of times I just ate cereal and drank milk. I still eat cereal for breakfast quite a bit, but I never drink milk anymore and really haven't since my grade school years.
We had a Zenith television at home. It was in the kitchen, which is also where we always ate. It'd been placed in a spot that was just below a window by the stove, kind of an awkward place to put it, and I know that it had been relocated from the living room to there. That was likely because my father often worked in the evenings using the kitchen table for a work table. Indeed, that some table was used for absolutely everything.
Television was new to my parents at the time and the TV, looking back, I now realize had only made its appearance a couple of years prior. Up until then they didn't have one so this television was their first TV. As first generation television owners their habits didn't really match later generations in regard to it, although in my father's case it came to somewhat resemble the modern a bit at one time, before ceasing to once again. Anyhow, neither of my parents turned the television on in the morning.
But I did, and my mother let me do that.
At that time there was no such thing as cable television, at least in our town, and so broadcast TV was it. Very early on there was only one channel, but because of my specific memory recollected here, I know that we had at least two, and maybe three, channels. One of the channels, even though it was local, rebroadcast material from Denver's KOA television and other channels. In the morning that one played kids shows. One was the legendary Captain Kangaroo, which I would watch before going to school, and the other was a local Denver product which featured a young female host and a sock puppet character of some sort. That one took submissions form the viewing audience and I once had a drawing I sent in shown in that part of the show.
School started at 8:00 and some time prior to that I went out the door, rain, shine or snow, and walked to school. The hike was about a mile, which isn't far. Nobody ever drove me or my associates to school. . . ever. Indeed, while my mother could drive and my father had purchased what I now know was a 1963 Mercury Meteor for her to have something to drive, but she was an awful driver and it was undoubtedly best she didn't drive me to school, but then nobody's parents did. The few kids who were hauled to school by motor vehicle were hauled by school bus, if they lived in the boundaries. At the end of the school day, which I think was around 3:30, we walked back home.
If we had homework to do we did it then, and I know that homework actually did start to become a feature of our routine in 2nd Grade. Our parents were expected to help us with penmanship, which my mother did. Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting. I never have. They also helped us with math, which at that time my mother did as well. Both of my parents were really good with math, which I also have never been. I recall at the time that we all had to struggle with "New Math", which was as short lived ill fated experiment at teaching something that is both natural and in academics dating back to antiquity in a new way. It was a bad experiment and its taken people like me, upon whom it was afflicted, decades to recover from it. It also meant that both of my parents, my mother first and my father later, were subject to endless frustration as they tried to teach me math effectively, having learned real math rather than new math.
If I didn't have home work or if I had finished it, I was allowed to turn on the television once again. Gilligan's Island, the moronic 1960s sit com, was already in syndication and one of the local channels picked it up in a rebroadcast from Denver and played it at 4:30. At 5:00 the same channel played McHale's Navy.
My father normally left work around 5:00 p.m. and was home very shortly thereafter. At this point in time he had to travel further across town so that usually meant that he was home no earlier than 5:15 but on some occasions it was later, around 5:30. Usually he got home prior to 5:30 however, and when he did, he switched the channel to the news over my protests.
The network nightly news came on at 5:00 and ran to 5:30. At 5:30 the local news was shown on one of the local channels. My father watched both and the custom became to leave the television on during dinner, something that I haven't liked as an adult. From around this time until his later years he kept the television on until he want to bed, often simply as something on in the background as he worked. Interestingly, he'd counsel me not to attempt to do homework in front of the television as he regarded it as impossible. I didn't at the time, but he was quite correct.
I don't recall what he watched on TV as a rule. My mother never picked up the evening television habit and just didn't watch it. Indeed, her intentional television watching was limited to a very few number of shows including Days Of Our Lives during one hour of the daily afternoon, and things such as The Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk. Having said that, just looking through the shows that were on in 1970, it seems to me back then they both watched some series that were brand new to television at the time. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one they both liked and it debuted in 1970. The Odd Couple was as well.. The Flip Wilson Show they also liked and was new. The short run Tim Conway Show they also liked. Some others that were still on that they never watched were shows like Hogan's Hero's, which was nearing the end of its run.
One thing that networks did at that time, as well as local channels, was to run movies. When they did, it tended to be a big deal. I can recall Lawrence of Arabia running when I was in my early grade school years, being broadcast over two nights. My mother, who admired T. E. Lawrence, watched both nights, which was unusual. I also recall The Longest Day running, again over two nights, when I was in 1st Grade.
So what's that have to do with Cambodia?
11th ACR in Cambodia.
Well, a lot in terms of my recollection of this day.
We grade school boys were familiar with war, as in "the war", and that war was World War Two. Some of us had fathers who had been in World War Two, although they were older fathers, keeping in mind that in that era people had larger families and children stretched out over their parent's lifespans often differently than they do now. It wasn't unusual for a grade school kid to have a father who had been in World War Two, and indeed my closest friend's father had been in the ETO during the war. The dominance of World War Two in the culture, however, may be shown by the fact that I had a father who had been in the Korean War and I still thought of World War Two as "the war" and my father more or less did as well, which is odd to realize in that it wasn't just him, but others of his age and equivalent experience who took that view. Indeed, it seems to me that it wasn't until right about this time, 1970, that the started to talk about their own war at all, and indeed also about this time it began to creep into the culture as background elements in popular stories.
Adding to this was the impact of popular culture. As noted, the movie The Longest Day was such a big deal that it sticks out in my mind as something shown on television around 1969, probably in a network premier. The movie Patton, one of the most celebrated American military movies of all time, was released in April 1970, and indeed its sometimes noted that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger watched a private screening of it just shortly before U.S. armor went into Cambodia, although the suggestion that this influenced Nixon seems specious to me, the invasion having been something that events were working up to since the mid 60s and which had been ongoing for weeks prior to the US putting its forces in. In other media, kids who liked cartoon books, which I never have, circulated such works as Sergeant Rock or GI Combat, both of which were set in World War Two.
So, for a 6 and 7 year old boy, we knew about wars, in the childish youthful glorification of war sense that has been a common feature of the play of boys since the dawn of man, but the war we knew about was a movie and cartoonish version of World War Two.
On May 1, 1970 I watched Gilligan's Island. Following that McHale's Navy came on and I started watching that. My father got home almost immediately after McHale's Navy started and switched the channel to the news, over my protest. To my shock, the news featured M113 Armored Personnel Carriers crossing a river.
I was stunned and asked my father "what's that?". It looked like something out of The Longest Day. I can't recall his exact words but he told me that the scene depicted US troops in action in Cambodia.
The fact that it had an impact is best demonstrated that fifty years later, I still recall it. It was unsettling. Even at 6 it was obvious that the school yard games we played in which the Allies and the Axis duked it out in Europe and Asia 30 years prior were being overshadowed by a real war in our own era. People were fighting and it wasn't a game.
It was a type of epiphany, to be sure. But a person needs to be careful about claiming too much. It isn't as if at nearly age 7 I suddenly became keenly aware of everything going on in Indochina. But suddenly I was much more aware of something that had actually been playing in the background my entire life. Indeed, as it was in the background, but subtle, and often limited at that age to a short snipped on the nightly news that was often devoid of any real engaging footage, it was just something, up until then, that was.
Of course, while 7 years old isn't old, even at 7 your early early childhood years are waning. The next five years in Vietnam, only three of which had a large scale American presence, were ones that were hard not to be aware of. The unrelated but still huge news event of Watergate was impossible not to be aware of. And by the time the Republic of Vietnam started collapsing in 1975, I was old enough to be very much aware of it.
But that awareness started on this day in 1970.
_______________________________________________________________________________ Related thread:
Yeah, so its a Congressman from Tarpon Springs, Florida with a giant sponge (on February 25, 1920). So what, it's a million times more interesting than This Is Us.
NBC is involved in a Communist, Fascist, Anarchist, Monarchist conspiracy to bring down Western society through a fit of hyper sappiness slopped about the landscape through the abomination of the television show This Is Us.
That ain't us. That isn't anybody, except in the fevered cavernous mind of some screenwriters at NBC. No real person could stand this collection of saps in the real world. They need a quick kick in the rear and an rendition to Aleppo.
Forget the impeachment, forget the imbroglio about Ukraine, forget Vladimir Putin scheming to make himself Russian Czar for eternity.
There's really serious bad news out there.
Taylor McGregor is leaving her position as a sports announcer for AT&T SportsNet in Colorado to take up one as a reporter for the Marquee Sports Network in Chicago, where she'll cover the Cubs. She covered the Rockies in Colorado.
Will the tragedies never cease?
For those unfamiliar with McGregor, the tall blond sportscaster combined Kate Upton quality good looks (it's my blog. . . I can say that) with really excellent sports delivery. Indeed, it was that delivery that makes her a great sportscaster.
McGregor is one of Keli McGregor's daughters. Keli McGregor was the president of the Rockies and died of a heart attack, due to an undetected viral infection, at age 48. Taylor was 17 years old at the time. Since that tragedy she went on to the University of Arkansas where, as in high school, she was a standout athlete in her own right. At about the time of her graduation she was seeing baseball player Ty Hensley who was about to break out into the major leagues, but never really did. Hensley plays with the Utica Unicorns now.
Hensley's star may have faded, although he's still achieved something I never will in actually being a professional baseball player, but Taylor's has risen. After graduating she was located as a sportscaster in Casper Wyoming for awhile where it was obvious that she was headed for a lot more than broadcasting local sports. Indeed, I've noted that before.
and the pundits were already expressing disappointment with Mueller's testimony.
What the heck?
Mueller is a careful measured lawyer. It's really unlikely that he's going to come across like Sam Spade in the final scenes of The Maltese Falcon, let alone like Inspector Cleuceau in any Pink Panther film. So you are never going to hear 1) "Trump did him in with a candle stick in the drawing room" or 2) "Trump is as innocent as the day is long".
On my news feed, there's a story I didn't read, with the headline:
Jennifer Lopez Turns 50. Her scandalous love life exposed.
How odd.
I don't know, nor do I care, if Lopez has a "scandalous" love life, I'm just amazed that any press anywhere acknowledges that such a thing as a "scandalous love life" exists.
I guess I'd have to read it to find out, but unless she's hanging out with Putin, Kim Jong-un and procuring for that Epstein dude, it'd be hard to figure out how any current entertainment reporter could find a scandal, let alone recognize one, that was high enough to meet the current bar.
The fact that those who think that abstaining from vaccinating their children would cite to a Brady Bunch episode in their support is proof, as if any is needed, on what an astoundingly ill advised concept that movement supports.
Now, I get it, it's supposed to suggest that back in the 60s and 70s nobody thought the measles were a big deal.
Well people did think the measles were a big deal, they were just common and therefore often had to be endured. It's not that people welcomed them or regarded them as light sniffles. Indeed, having lived through that era, I can recall parents dreading them.
And citing to examples from prior decades on matters of health isn't really the wisest thing to do in all cases, now is it?
Game of Thrones. I'm totally disinterested. It strikes me, frankly, as just flat out silly and a little dim.
Why watch a pseudo Medieval England when you can read about the real one?
Alfred the Great's father AEthelwulf. Why did his young son take office over his elders? Why did Alfred go to Rome as a boy? Why did Alfred's parents name him "Advised by Elves". Why do people watch a goofball television show with an actress who is hopelessly clean in a Medieval setting and looks like an albino?
I also can't muster up any real interest over UW's most recent president Laurie Richards being demoted back to professor.
I really ought to. And I did care when Sternberg was demoted. It seems to me that Richards did a good job, but I really can't muster up a snit about it.
Old geology lecture hall at the University of Wyoming. I've noted before that I have an ambivalent relationship with my two time alma mater that I don't have with my first one, a community college. Indeed, post public schooling warm feelings, I have stronger ones for that college and the Field Artillery training school at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for some reason. I really have no idea why. Perhaps that's why I recall can't muster up a snit about the current UW president situation.
And I'm also disinterested in the scandal in which Felicity Huffman and Lori Loghlin are accused of paying bribes to get their children into competitive private universities. I'm generally disinterested in actors and actresses anyhow, and frankly I have always simply assumed that baksheesh is an element of getting into the big dollar schools. Wasn't this always obvious? It seems to me to be pretty clear, but perhaps I was naive in thinking this was a scandal as society at large is. . . well apparently naive.
Mabel Normand, actress. She died at age 37 in 1930. I just like the photo.
playing the most over-sensitive, wimpiest, designated guy who has the feelings of a girl that girls pretend they want to love but in real life can't stand for more than 27 seconds, character on television?
I'll bet he does.
I bet at night he goes home and puts on his well worn Blue Ray of The Wild Bunch and imagines that he has the William Holden Role. . . in real life.
Probably drinks a Pabst Blue Ribbon, smokes a cigar, and wishes. . . .
