Begin the Beguine

The night before Thanksgiving a channel on my dish setup was playing "swing classics," and I clicked it up since there was nothing at all I wanted to watch. This was one of the first plays--I ended up listening for several hours while I read things on the computer and Libby worked on the Thanksgiving dinner we were going to transport over to the old vet's the following day. I've found over many years of experience that it's probably wise to stay out of the kitchen when Libby's at work, unless she particularly wants me for some specific task. Otherwise, I just manage to scatter her momentum and something gets left out of the sauce, or added twice, since my default mode is to blurt out whatever pops into my mind as though that's how one conducts conversation. In the middle of a cooking process, however, it is simply not helpful for me to ask, "Hey, have you seen my black winter hooded coat lately?"

So here's what I heard instead:



This wasn't precisely what I heard, because the recording brought out the magnificent drum work better than this video, probably because live recording of drums in an open room is nearly impossible. Whatever. What a gorgeous arrangement! Happy Thanksgiving.

November 22 Rolls Around Again

If you live in a distant backwater, as I do, the "big events" happen, but it's easy to remain fairly sanguine. Nothing much has happened out here. Now that my job has ended, the only Latino person I encounter is a very nice man who is among the staff caring for my father-in-law, who I call the old vet herein. He's in his 20s, and spent some time in France before returning to his home town--here. When I see him in the evenings I sometimes wave and say "Bon soir" with a smile. He smiles back. Last night I didn't go see the old vet but watched Monday night football. The Raiders and the Houston Texans were playing in an historic stadium in Mexico City, the place where Carlos and Smith held up black gloved fists in '68; the place where many famous soccer matches have been played. It seemed that the fans last night favored the Raiders. One of them even had a small laser spot and shown it into the eyes of the Houston players now and again. The Raiders eventually won. Twenty-one million people live in Mexico City.

It's hard to come to some realistic appraisal of what has happened. Partly this is because relatively speaking, nothing has happened, not yet. What we have at the moment is a very weird fact. A person who cannot fly the airplane has taken the controls and is locked into the cockpit. We're still at a comfortable 35 thousand feet. The attendants still have their snack trays, and our neighbors are having extra peanuts and a slosh of bourbon with ice. We listen intently for some change in the sound of the engines, or check to see if the ground remains a comfortable distance below, or if the plane is remaining in a level position. Soon it will be night, removing some of those comforting visual cues.

On the TV everything is reassurance. There is very little to suggest that we have actually given control of our lives to a person who very clearly and obviously told us he could not fly the plane. I wondered this morning if it's just been far too many entertainments over the years, too many romantically attractive Godfathers and Tony Sopranos. The very entertaining movie by Tony Scott, True Romance, came to mind unbidden. There's nothing much funnier, on the funny scale, than the scene with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. Oh yes, it's gallows humor to be sure, and a lot of other things swirling around us now, like the fall leaves. Tony Scott said he could never figure out how to end his movies, except with a big shootout. He thought that was a directorial weakness, but it might have been a logical feature of his plots. Something Peckinpah came up against back in '68, same year as Carlos and Smith. Before the shooting started Peckinpah liked to have a scene where the Bunch tossed around a bottle of whiskey, shared it to the end, and laughed. We have a city named Phoenix. That's a curiosity, isn't it.

I read a blog now and again which is comprised of high level legal people, some of them Constitutional lawyers, talking seriously about the meaning of things. I ran into this today:

https://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/11/will-united-states-survive-this.html

Professor Levinson is seriously arguing that the last safety net between us and that locked cockpit door is a coalition of Electors taking it upon themselves to refuse to vote for Trump. That's a hell of a note. Here's a bit of Levinson, but you should read it all.

I joined my two University of Texas colleagues Jeff Tulis and Jeremy Suri in writing an op-ed, published in today's New York Daily News. As you can see (if you open it), it calls for a coalition of Democratic and at least 37 Republican electors to ally to vote for a Republican other than Donald Trump and thus throw the election into the House, which would presumably elect the alternative Republican and save us from the Trumpian menace, the character of which seems clearer day by day. Even though he cannot be assigned direct responsibility, I note the following postcard that I received today at my Harvard Law School office, mailed, it seems, from the UK. It reads, in toto: "Hey Sandy You just got your kike ass kicked. fuck you kykie. We're gonna Drain the Swamp at Harvard Law. Juden Raus!" There can be no doubt that Trump and Bannon have liberated the worst instincts of a lot of truly deplorable people. The most unequivocally happy supporter of the new Trump regime is David Duke, which makes a lot of sense. This is precisely why it is important for conservatives of good will to come together, at long last, for a true "never Trump" movement that would act completely constitutionally by imploring electors to accept the responsibilities actually envisioned for them by the Philadelphia Framers...

The arguments, which never go away, about racial identity, are like the formulae for the atomic bomb. Last night during halftime I watched a bit of coverage concerning the alt.right convention just past in DC. It ended with Seig Heil salutes, and an oily tongued guy named Spencer talking about "them and us, your race and mine." I ran into people running that line back at UNC, in '63. They never go away, the words just change with the times. Sometimes the moves are slick. George Herbert Walker Bush, who mostly seems like a distant liberal President from some other Century (well, yes, the 20th) from the perspective of this post-election sleep-walk, gave us Clarence Thomas. "You say you want a black justice? Try this one." Things have changed. All the apologists keep saying is, "Oh, it's really not that bad." What's the point in having a riot at 35 thousand feet?

There aren't many options. "Let's roll" doesn't really get you very far. It's another Peckinpah ending. And it's like the fact that Americans who desperately need Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare have actually voted to take all that away. It's no wonder Dan Rather had decided to spend his golden years interviewing country singing divas and aging rock stars. He tried to warn us about George W. Bush.

Here's another paragraph from Levinson:

How, if [Trump] becomes president, might the civil war begin, since there will certainly be no Fort Sumter to signal the beginning, and the California vote for secession apparently won't take place until 2019. I think the most likely beginning would be reminiscent of the violence in the streets of Boston over the rendition of fugitive slaves like Anthony Burns. [It should be clear, incidentally, that Burns violated the law by fleeing his confinement as a slave, and the august Supreme Court, in the worst single decision in our history, worse even than Dred Scott, upheld the Fugitive Slave Law of 1893 in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, and Abraham Lincoln himself, the Great Emancipator, declared that Republicans had a duty to support the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the deal that had been made with the slaveowners in order to get the Constitution in the first place.] That is, if peaceful families of undocumented aliens start being rounded up and sent to concentration camps prior to their deportation, it becomes the duty of all of us to stand in solidarity with them and prevent the legal authorities from being able to carry out their "duties" without becoming aware of the absolute contempt in which they are held. (Obviously, there will also be many people cheering them on.)

This is what Churchill meant by the gathering storm. He could see disaster coming. Sometimes the worst disasters are those which are driven by compelling moral arguments. You simply cannot sit back and watch the lines march into the ovens.



Some years after filming that remarkable scene exactly as written by Quintin Tarantino, in True Romance, Tony Scott jumped off a bridge in Los Angeles. Perhaps he had looked into the abyss. We are standing at the abyss right now.

But I'm A-gonna Be A Diamond Some Day

[Crazy Horse Monument, South Dakota]

So I went down to the recycle center this morning with a bucket of plastic containers, a bucket of steel cans, and some trash. Getting ready for the weekend, and it's nice to start with an empty kitchen garbage can. A neighbor was there. He loves to talk, so we talked for a good while. On the back windshield of his truck was a "Never Hillary" sticker, and he also had a bumper sticker supporting our Republican Lieutenant Governor. He wasn't talking about the election and I didn't bring it up. What's the point. He's been a very nice neighbor and I always enjoy running into him in places like the recycle center. We're probably about the same age, and he pulled out his wallet at one point and showed me his permanent National Parks pass, which he told me he'd bought at Carlesbad Caverns, NM, some years ago. He recommended I get me one, which I certainly will if we can ever find a long term cat sitter. Mokey, the gray one, gets very depressed when we're gone for more than ten hours, and stops eating. Last time that happened we'd gone to play a gig in Wilmington and were planning to spend the night, but then changed our minds and drove back. Didn't matter. A week later Mokey was at the vets getting shots and stuff to jump start the little guy. It was close to as expensive as the tree guy who came and rescued Wuzzy out of a tall tree. Wuzzy's still never quite gotten over that.

The neighbor talked about many of his trips, including one out to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and the in-progress Crazy Horse Monument. He's got a travel trailer. He also told me about something more recent, where his wife had driven off in the truck with her purse on the tool box, and came back to realize it had flown off somewhere, who knows. They were in the process of cancelling cards, stopping checks, etc., when a guy drove up to his house with the purse in his hands. He'd found it on the road, run over. It was messed up, but everything was there mostly, and the guy led my neighbor back to where he'd found the purse, and they walked up and down the road and found every last thing. That was a very good story.

When you get to that part of a conversation at the recycle center, you can offer a like story of your own if you have one. I told him about the house that got blown to smithereens down on Ocracoke. This was about 15 years ago. A water spout had come across a little point and just blown up this old house that was the most exposed to the fetch. Next day I drove by there as it was the talk of the island. There was nothing at all left on the lot but the block foundation, and in the middle of that, a toaster. That was it. I wish I had a picture to show you. Not a scrap of wood, nary a shingle. About a week later the house started washing up on the beach, which is around the south inlet and some miles from the lot, bit by bit by bit. The owners had even posted a notice about the whole deal at the island grocery store. They got some photographs back too, a little soggy but basically ok.

I'd been standing there holding this tub of plastic containers during the whole conversation, and I said I had to go, and walked the containers up to the appropriate dumpster. Walking back to my truck the neighbor asked me, "did you hear about the road blocks they've had to set up, all the way up to South Dakota?" I didn't hear about any of that. "Yeah," he said, "they're hauling a big lump of coal up there to Rushmore. Obama's statue."

The neighbor thought that was pretty slick and laughed a good bit. When I got back home I found the following link up on the Internet Tubes.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/11/jefferson-beauregard-sessions

I'd been hoping all morning that rumors about Sessions were just that. Apparently not. A guy at the Post Office shook his head when I asked him what he thought about the election. "My kids are upset," he said. "I tell them, it's up to you now, you are the future. I thought we'd do better here in NC. The black people need to come out stronger." He and his wife were back from a three-week stay in Paris. He showed me some smart phone movies of a street band working just outside their Paris digs. John Henry he was a steel drivin' man. But that reminds me of another lyric. "Ask her for water, she give me gasoline."

[Kirby and Mokey in a sunbeam, yesterday. Kirby's the one who got lost for a week in the woods earlier this year.]

Tony Vaccaro, Realist

The old vet is 93, and he struggles with his memory. Last night on HBO they ran a documentary on another 93-year-old veteran of World War II, European Theatre. He's in better health, and actually revisits many of the battlefield moments that he photographed in 1944-45 as he made his way across France, Belgium, and Germany with the 83rd Thunderbolt Division.

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/underfire-the-untold-story-of-pfc-tony-vaccaro

His path was much the same as the old vet's, who was in the 35th. The old vet missed the Hurtgen Forest butchery. The 83rd didn't. There was butchery aplenty to go around. Both divisions liberated German death camps. Mr. Vaccaro was an "amateur" war photographer. He had volunteered to be a professional war photographer, and showed his high school work to the people who were staffing those positions. They said his work was great, but that he was "too young." An odd rejection. He was, as he told them, not too young to pull a trigger. Vaccaro was also determined. He carried a 35 millimeter camera with him for the entire time he was in Europe, and took hundreds of battlefield photos. At the end of the war he was so sickened by what he had seen that he gave the photos, mostly negatives, to his sister to keep, and went on to become a professional photographer in the world of fashion, never to personally visit war again. But he has in his heart a steely ability to keep seeing a-right, just as he had in those distant days. And he sees, too, how deeply war corrodes the soul. As he says at one point, "I had become a killer. I lost my innocence."

“War makes you a beast, I became a killer, that’s a terrible thing for a human being to have on his shoulders” he says movingly of his combat time. “The faces of people you killed, the friends who died, they don’t leave you alone. It took me years to overcome that. “It was necessary for me to be evil for 272 days, but not forever.” [Wiki entry on Vaccaro]

I hope you can see this film. Mr. Vaccaro has some things to tell you that you need to know, perhaps now more than ever. One of the early scenes in the film involves a photographer in our endless Afganistan War. He tells the camera about happening upon a moment of death amongst our soldiers, attempting to photograph it, and being beaten up and driven away by those same soldiers. Similar things are related by other war photographers about other wars. "You have to be in the parade to take photos," someone tells such a photographer. Vaccaro was in the parade from the get-go. He carried the M1 Garrand, and used it.

We've elected another guy who talks big and has never seen war. He'll be good with sending more kids over to fight, somewhere or other, where ever the perimeters happen to be. There was a terrific book by Harry Brown written about the Italian campaign called "A Walk in the Sun." In it a soldier talks about where he'll be fighting in 1958. He predicts somewhere like Afganistan. Soldiering can create an obliterating perspective. There is always, to a professional soldier, a perimeter to maintain. This is perhaps one of the many reasons that, since the end of Vietnam, there has mostly been a series of perimeters. And of course as the Germans understood, when you assert a perimeter, you assert solidarity on the inside of it. We must all fight together. Build the wall higher.

The worst thing a soldier can have is his more or less god-given empathy. In the film it is related that in World War II over 50% of soldiers never fired their weapons. They didn't want to kill people. This problem has been addressed. These days, the percentage is nearly 100%, in the direction of death. Professional killers come with the relentless territory, on all sides.

Vaccaro manages to realize this. He maintains his humanity. When I finished watching Under Fire I flipped over to the Giants/Bengals game. Monday night football, woohoo. After a little while I just turned the thing off, fed the cats, and went to bed early.

Just sayin'.

[Top photo Tony Vaccaro, bottom photo from coverage of a Trump rally this fall, photographer unknown]