Lance Mannion

Lucky for her she's so darn adorable

Shakespeare's Sister, who normally has a good sense of humor, thought she'd be funny and stick me with one of those blogger memes.

Lucky for her, she's adorable, otherwise I'd get her for this.  I'd drop her from my blog roll, sign her up for all kinds of spam lists, and send a mash note to Bill Frist and sign her name to it, if she wasn't so dadblamed Hoosiery cute and likeable.

So I'm going through with this.

This one is meant to maneuver the poor sap who's caught it into revealing something of his true self.  But as I told Mrs Shakes, since I'm basically a fictional character all of my answers are suspect as they might very well be fictional as well, which I think defeats the purpose.  Which is another reason I'm agreeing to follow through.  I can lie or not lie and you'll never know.

Question number 1:  What are three of the stupidest things you've done in your life.

A:

1.  Went back to Eva Dorsey's house that night.

2.  Bet my friends that I could so walk the whole way across the bridge on the railing and back.

3.  Back in college I worked as an usher in a movie theater.  One busy night the hallways were full of people waiting to get into the 9 o'clock show, which was sold out.   The manager had us stand at the doors of the auditorium when the first show, also a sell out, ended and direct the crowd to go out by way of the fire exits down by the screen so that the crowd waiting to get in and the crowd wanting to go out didn't get all tangled up and nobody got trampled to death.  This was working fine until one guy, who was about six foot seven and weighed 350 pounds and dressed like a biker decided he didn't want to go out the fire exit, he wanted to go out the regular way because he had to use the bathroom.

I told him no, he couldn't do that.

But that wasn't the stupid thing I did.

The stupid thing I did was, after he picked me up and bounced me off the wall, I got to my feet and stood in his way again.

Stupid as all three things were to do, none of them damaged me greviously or had consequences severe enough to make them the answer to Question number 6.   The biker's girlfriend saved my life, I won my bet, and although Eva broke my heart it turned out not be as badly as either one of us expected it to be and I was over her in a week.  She never forgave me for that.

Question number 2:  At the current moment, who has the most influence on your life?

A:  Shakespeare's Sister.  I mean, look at me.  There are a hundred other things I would like to be doing, could be doing, should be doing, and yet I'm sitting here answering these questions, thanks to her influence.  How much more influence over another human being can one woman have?

What do you mean that's cheating?  Who died and made you ruler of all the blog memes?

Question number 3:  If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to only pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

A: You mean if I had a time machine all I could do with it was go cadge a meal someplace?

Oh, all right.  Let's see.  First, for me it has to be people who were born after the invention of the knife and fork, also after indoor plumbing and refrigeration.  I don't care how interesting these historical personages are, I'm not going to enjoy my meal if they're sitting there smelling like wet buffalo, shoving mashed potatoes into their mouths with their fingers, and serving me food that's been sitting out unrefrigerated for God knows how long so I'm going to die of bottulism.

1.  Jean Harlow.  2.  Marilyn Monroe.  3.  Vivien Leigh.   4.  Grace Kelly.  5. Noel Coward.

Noel Coward?

Yeah.  Someone's got to keep the conversation flowing and I figure Coward could handle that without being any real competition for the ladies' attentions.

Question number 4:  If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

A:  Let's assume some nobler blogger who caught this meme has used their three wishes to take care of all the peace, love, end of hunger and disease, and buying the world a Coke and keeping it company business.  Let's also assume I can't use these wishes for myself or anyone I know personally.

1.  The Mets get some strong middle relief and take a pass on Gary Sheffield.

2.  Somebody finds five new plays by Shakespeare, written in his prime---no more of those weak collaborations he worked on when he was at the end of his career and just marking time until his investments paid off and he could go home to Stratford.  Failing that, all the rest of Dickens' manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood which unbeknownst to his friends and family he did in fact finish before he died.

3. Nobody in Hollywood ever, ever, ever gets it into their heads to do movie versions of Cheers, The Dick Van Dyke Show, MASH, or Gilligan's Island.  And if they do make a Gilligan's Island, there will be no pie fight between Mary Ann and Ginger.

Question number 5:  Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live a the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

A:

1.  Regret not having.

i.  A beach.

ii.  A good, clean motel with a discreet and reliable staff that takes cash.  The motel, not the staff, although they keep their mouths shut, they'll find I'm a generous tipper.

2.  Things to avoid.

i.  The public library.  The librarians don't like me there.

ii.  The Christian ice cream shop.  The ice cream's all right, but the Muzak is infuriatingly uplifting.

Question number 6:  Name one event that has changed your life.

A:  When I taught freshman comp, I used to give this question as a writing assignment the first day of class.  I used it as both a way for students to introduce themselves and to judge their current level of writing skill while not asking them to have to work too hard right off the bat.  But I had some rules.

They couldn't write about finding God, falling in love, the death of someone they loved, or a personal tragedy that they wouldn't tall a stranger about at a party.  I added that last one after the first time I gave the assignment when I had to grade three essays titled "The night I was raped."

Some things are important to write about but they should not be graded.

"So, teach?" the students would ask then, "What can we write about?"

I told them they needed to be flexible in their definition of an event.  There are big events, and there are little events.  People tend to focus on the big events in their lives, but not all of those actually change their lives, while some very small events can have consequences that we live with until the day we die.

"So, teach," the students would ask again, for they were a smart and lively bunch, full of pep and aching with the desire to learn, "What do you consider an event?"

At this point, having craftily contrived to be holding a very heavy text book throughout this part of my lecture, I would heave the book across the room and watch it bounce off the wall.

"That," I would say, after letting the stunned silence that always followed deepen for a moment or two, "was an event."

Then I would walk calmly over to the book, pick it up, and with a sly smile say to the class, "The sequel."

Amazingly, that did not inspire sixty-two essays entitled "How I went into my first day of Freshman Comp and discovered my instructor was a raving lunatic and so I ran screaming to my advisor and dropped the class like a hot brick."

So here's my event.  It's a small one.

My first semester at Boston University, I missed the first day of classes because I was in the housing office arguing over where I was going to live that year.  I thought it should be in an off-campus apartment.  BU thought it should be in an off-campus motel room with four other students it didn't have space for in the dorms.  I won, but because I wasn't in class that day I wasn't assigned to a discussion group for my Intro to Broadcasting and Film class, the famous BF101, taught by the late, great Murray Yaeger.  When I showed up for the second class and presented myself to Murray he took a sheet of paper from his briefcase that had the class lists for all the discussion groups.  "We need to get you assigned," he said.  He lifted his finger over the page, circled it in the air a couple of times, and stabbed it down without looking.  "There you go," he announced.  "This is your group."

So I went to the classroom where my group was meeting.  There were about 15 other students, including this very annoying blonde girl from Philadelphia.

No, no, no.  I'm not violating my own rule about no falling in love stories.  That blonde and I didn't fall in love.  That day.

Question number 7:  Is not a question.  It's a command.  Tag five other people.

Make me!

(Update:  Res dared me to pass it along.  I'd ignore the challenge, except that since his web page his called the Republic of Dogs, his dare might be considered a double-dog dare or even a triple-dog dare, and no real man can refuse one of those.  So:

Res is tagged.  So is the Linkmeister.  Sorry, Link.  He dared me.  MadKane, but she's got to sing all her answers.  Jeannette.  More for her to muse on in her middle-age.  I'd love to tag the Countess, but I think she's already answered this one.  If not, and she's willing, I expect all her answers to be in phrased with the royal We.  Otherwise,  or in addtion, Jaquandor.

Send me the link when you're done, folks.  Everybody else, please feel free to play along in the comments.

Apologetic update:  This is what I get for reading my comments first thing in the morning before having at least three cups of coffee.  I don't know how but I misread the dare.  It came from Ratty not res.  So now Ratty's tagged.  Too bad for him.  I was going to spare him since I hit him with the book meme a while back.   Unfortunately,  I checked with the judges, and res is still tagged, even though it's not his fault.  Sorry, guy.)

That thing I warned you about

There are some additions to the sidebar.

The new category on my blog roll, FILM MAJORS is up.   Please visit the folks on it.  I like 'em, you'll like 'em, everybody likes 'em.

My monthly archives are now available, just in case you're feeling nostalgic about October or February and want to stroll down memory lane with Lance Mannion.  You can also look at my first month's worth of posts and see that I had no idea what I was doing here.  That's way down at the bottom of the sidebar.

Also I have a Google Search button which doesn't work right yet.   You're supposed to be able search my site as well as the whole web, but so far all the searches I've tried on the site have returned "did not match any documents" messages, including a search for the words Lance and Mannion.   The web search button works fine, though.

And that thing I warned you was coming is there.  Go over to the sidebar and look.  You'll recognize it when you see it and you'll know what to do.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same.  I've re-cast THIS WEEK'S GUEST STARS.  I've added a few new blogs to every category.  And the TIP JAR is right where is always was!

I'm still asking for donations this week, even though that thing is there.  I'm hoping that thing will eventually make fundraising pleas like this unnecessary, but that will take a while and right now I can use some help.  Please, if you can, kick in a buck or two?  Thanks.

And many thanks to all who have donated so far.  You've been very generous and it's a real help.

A prayer to St Dimas

St Dimas was the good thief, one of the two crucified with Christ, the one who told his partner to shut up and stop taunting Jesus and then asked Jesus to put in a good word for him with God.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: "Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!"

But the other criminal rebuked him. "Don't you fear God," he said, "since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong."

Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus answered him, "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise."

Dimas is the patron saint of thieves.  He is not their patron saint the way St Anthony is the patron saint of lost items.  You pray to St Anthony to help you find something you've misplaced, like when your car keys have gone missing.  You don't pray to St Dimas to help you pull off a heist.  You pray to him when your conscience is bothering you and you want to go straight.  Which is why all of us can pray to him, not just those of us who have trouble with the notion of private property.  All of us need to give up our lives of crime and go straight.  But criminals get so much else wrong, I figure those of them who've heard of St Dimas probably get this one wrong too and wind up praying to him for aid and guidance.

"St Dimas, please.  Make the cop on the beat suddenly hungry for a donut.  Cause the alarms not to sound and any possible witnesses to forget their glasses.  And please, see to it that the owner of the store left the money in the cash drawer because he was in too much of a hurry to get home to screw his wife, he didn't want to waste time making the night deposit.  And please, please, if none of this works out, let me get a halfway decent lawyer who paid attention in night school and a judge who I remind him of his best friend from grade school, the guy who saved his life in the war.  Thank you.  Amen."

Anyway, I'm wondering if the thieves going around the area swiping religious statues from people's lawns pray to St Dimas, and which way.

So far they've taken a couple Virgin Marys and an Infant of Prague that weighed 280 pounds.  Police figure it's kids stealing the statues for the fun of it.  It's not as if there's a thriving black market in lawn ornamentation of any kind.  These statues aren't on their way to Russia like a batch of stolen BMWs.  In fact, all three have turned up, the worse for wear, dumped by the thieves for whom the fun probably wore off pretty quickly when the statues began to get too heavy to carry anymore.  One of the Marys was pulled from Tin Brook yesterday, in pieces, unfortunately.

But maybe it was a case that St Dimas got to them, without their having called on him, and their consciences began to bother them.  I hope so.

The Infant of Prague belonged to a Vietnam vet who put it out on his lawn in memory of a buddy.

Ernest and Joe fought in Vietnam and wound up stateside in the same military hospital. Joe lost his sight in the war. To calm him during their convalescence, Ernest prayed to the Infant Jesus of Prague for the return of Joe's sight.

Ernest had prayed to the statue of miracles once as a boy in a Canadian church. "After that, my life changed," he assured Joe. "It's like I went through life with a shield of armor." He told his friend he would return there to pray for Joe's eyesight.

Ernest never made it to the church to ask the icon for help and Joe has since passed away. But years later, Ernest remembered his promise and ordered an Italian white-marble Infant Jesus of Prague for his home's yard.

(From the story by Alexa James in yesterday's Times Herald-Record.)

Many non-Catholics think Catholics pray to their statues.  They think this because a lot of Catholics do pray to their statues.  We're not supposed to.  Statues are meant to be aids to prayer, meditating on them is supposed to help us focus.  But people being people, some of us get confused, and the statues take on life in our imaginations.  They become animated with the spirits of whatever saints or angels they're meant only to represent.

So it's not surprising non-Catholics think of us as a cult of idol worshippers sometimes.  Those of us who keep seeing the images of the Blessed Virgin and Jesus in grilled cheese sadnwiches and in rust stains on the walls of highway underpasses don't help with our public relations.

Not surprisingly, many Catholics are touchy on the subject.  One of the touchy kind is a reader of the newspaper and after the first story appeared yesterday she called up the city desk to lecture the editor on the Church's teachings on statuary and other religious icons.  The reader finished her theology lesson by sniffing, "You really should have some practicing Catholics working there to explain these things to you."

"You're speaking to one," the editor replied with the forgiving calmness of a saint.

The reader sputtered.  The editor twisted the knife.

"And the reporter who wrote the story is too."

St Francis de Sales is the patron saint of journalists.  I'm thinking somebody should buy that editor a statue of St Francis for her desk as a reward for her presence of mind.

Of course, somebody might steal it.  Those statue thieves are still at large.

Maybe she should get a statue of St Dimas to go with it.

Lance Mannion cites scripture for his own purposes

Today's reading is from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 6, verses 16-19.

There are six things which the Lord hates,
   seven that are an abomination to him: 
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
   and hands that shed innocent blood, 
a heart that devises wicked plans,
   feet that make haste to run to evil, 
a false witness who breathes out lies,
   and one who sows discord among brothers.

I have a post up at The American Street.  It's about Karl Rove's genius and George Bush's new clothes.   It's called "The race is not to the swift," and in it, like the devil I am, I cite scripture for my own purposes.

Joy and mayhem in Mudville

The always dependable, always comprehensvie, but usually self-effacing Jack Shannon makes a rare trip to the front of his own stage.  Drawing on his experience as a soccer coach, he takes the mike to report on yet more insane behavior by adults over their children's sports.

An outraged father attacked his daughter's softball coach with a baseball bat because the coach had the nerve, the nerve, to enforce his own rules about missing games and suspended the girl for missing a game.

Jack has a rundown on all the details plus some more horror stories about the ways parents have contrived to turn their kids' sports into nasty misadventures on the wrong side of the law.

I was the assistant coach for my son's T-ball and soccer teams and it was a lot of fun.  But he was younger then, all the games were more exercises in slapstick comedy than athletic competition, and at the end of the games most of the kids weren't even sure if their team had won or lost.

That would have changed if he'd continued. 

Everybody knows that children's sports in America are not about the kids having fun any more than Division I college football and basketball are about the players getting a good education.  In fact, children's sports are really the early farm clubs for the Division I teams.  They exist and are organized to identify and develop as early in life as possible the kids who will be good enough to win athletic scholarships and maybe, just maybe, as their parents hope and pray and in many cases have deluded themselves into believing, go on to the Pros.

That's why they've become so intense and so unfun.

All children's sports are about adult vanity.

I'm not talking only about the parents.

The father who attacked the coach was a criminal.  But the coach who was attacked was a jerk.  I'm not making a cause and effect argument.  The coach did not deserve to be beaten with a baseball bat.  I'm simply describing him based on the rule he was enforcing.

The girl was suspended for three games, including her big senior day game, because she missed one game to go to a prom.

You understand the thinking behind such a rule.  The coach is telling his players that a high school softball game should be more important than anything else in their lives, including events that are the highlights of most people's teenage years.

Why?

Because winning should be everything to them.  I know, he'd defend himself with some speech about how all the girls made a commitment and how they owe it to each other to give their all and so it's all about teamwork, responsibility, and loyalty.

Horse hockey.

It's all about that coach keeping his job.   He's paid to win games not teach good citizenship.  If his teams start losing, all the girls' parents, including the guy who tried to kill him for enforcing a rule designed to help the team win, would march on the headmaster's office to demand the coach be fired.

More than that, he needs to win in order to move up.  Maybe he wants to coach high school all his life.  But an awful lot of coaches are ambitious careerists these days.  Your kids don't matter to them except in so far as they help or hinder their chances of getting a better job at the next level of play.

Jerk coaches aren't new.  They aren't all professionals looking to polish their resumes either.  When I was in Little League I had two of them in a row.  The first was just abusive.  He loathed and despised all of his players for being lazy, no talent bums, and he constantly told us so, loudly and brutally, all of us, including and especially his own son.  We were 8.

The next guy was worse.  He played the same 9 kids for all 6 innings, every game, all season long, unless one of us benchwarmers' dads happened to be at the game and complained.  My dad worked late, so I had four at bats that season.

Our team won the championship but all the other coaches were so angry about it that the League instituted a rule, that was named after him, the Dudley Rule, which stated that all players must play at least three innings of every game.  But it was too late for me.  Those two coaches had convinced me I wanted nothing more to do with Little League.

I didn't quit playing organized baseball though.  I just played in a league organized and run by us kids.  My brother Luke was the Charlie Brown of our neighborhood.  He wasn't very good, and the teams he put together weren't very good, but he had us all playing regularly all summer long.

I'm sure this still goes on, kids taking charge of their own fun.  But I don't see the evidence of it.  Whenever I pass by a field, if it's not being used by an obviously adult-organized and sponsored teams, it's empty.

The fact is, I don't see how kids today could run their own leagues.  For one thing, we Gen X and boomer parents are horrified at the prospect of letting our kids out of our sight long enough for them to get together and plan and carry it off.  And for another, we've got them so over-scheduled that they don't have the time.  When Little League ends, summer soccer begins, when that ends, it's time for football and fall soccer.  Then comes basketball, then spring soccer, then Little League again.

Don't get me started on kids' hockey leagues, which have seasons that run from October through June and routinely require parents and players to get up at three in the morning and drive four hours in the winter dark, through blizzards, to get to games in which not even a cheap trophy is at stake.

I have a secret to confess.  It used to bother me that neither of my kids is any good at sports.  I wasn't much of an athlete myself when I was their age, but I wasn't uncoordinated.  The blonde was an athlete.  She played on her high school soccer team and played softball into her grown up years and was pretty good.  So I had hopes that we'd have kids who, even if they weren't stars, could hit and throw and catch and run well enough to play on their school teams.

Didn't quite work out that way.

Not only aren't they any good, they just aren't all that interested in sports.  I have to admit that when the 11 year old was little and I was coaching his teams this used to disappoint me a bit.  When he was in T ball I'd look out at the field at our team and see 8 kids doing their darndest to look like Big Leaugers and one kid with his back to home plate, bent over, picking dandelions and watching butterflies.

Player on the other team would hit the ball and 8 of our guys would dash from their positions and chase after the ball, usually colliding and collapsing in a heap before they'd get to it, and my kid wouldn't even look up from his entomological and botanical studies.

All the other parents would tell me how cute and adorable it was, but I couldn't help it, I was disappointed.

But a couple years later my brother Lyle's wife told me about how she was sitting in the stands one night watching her son play ball and she overheard another group of parents making fun of him.   That's right.  Adults were making fun of an 8 year old kid because he couldn't hit the ball out of the infield.

I decided right then I was glad I wouldn't be a Little League dad, because I knew that at some point I would have to deal with parents like those parents and then I would be the one in the news and being held up for scorn on Jack Shannon's webpage.

Dad in fistfight with other dads because they called his kid a whiff.

That nephew, by the way, is now president of his class.  He's probably the smartest of all 14 Mannion grandchildren, and there isn't a dunce in the bunch, rivaled only by his cousin Violet Mannion, who I hope you've all noticed has begun contributing to the comments section here at her old uncle's farm stand.

That nephew is smart, articulate, charming as all get out, a leader in the making, and you know what?  I'll bet those parents in the stands that day would still make fun of him.

And those parents are the face of kids sports in America.

Oh somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light.  And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, and somewhere, many wheres, kids are having a good time playing all kinds of sports---Blue Girl and her husband are having a lot of fun coaching their son's baseball team, even though according to the last report I got from Blue Girl they're the league doormat---But there's no joy in most of Mudville, as long as they let the adults in the gate.

Watch this space

Just a warning.  Ads are coming.

Should be here by the end of the week.  I hate to do this.  Not because I'm above a little money-grubbing.  I come from a long line of money grubbers.  My great-great-great-grandfather Snake Oil Mannion made his money selling whiskey and hors d'oeuvres to the Indians.

"Whiskey and hors d'oeuvres?"

He always said, "What's a drink without a nosh?"

You can also see I'm not above a little plagiarism as well.  The above joke was stolen from Hawkeye Pierce.  As Milton Berle used to say, if you're gonna steal, steal from the best.

Anyway, there will be ads here, adding to the clutter and uglying up the place, which is all I dislike about them.  Otherwise they're a necessity.  I don't expect the dough to start rolling in, but every little bit helps.

Unfortunately, to start, that's all it's likely to be, a little bit.  And there's a bit of a cash flow problem here at the Mannion Family Savings and Loan.  I just realized that we're leaving for vacation on Cape Cod in a couple of weeks and before we do we need to take the other car in for some work.  Two new rear tires, a new battery, a tune-up, and the air conditioner needs to be recharged.

Not your problem, I know.   But I still got to ask.

If you can, please hit the tip jars?  Amazon or PayPal, either one?

Thank you very much.  I'm not just grateful for your support.  It's what keeps me going.

Hour of the Gun

Wolcott catches Glenn Reynolds, in the process of being stupidly admiring of John Tierney being stupid, being stupidly admiring of Robert Heinlein being stupid.

Or not.

Heinlein may not have been being stupid when he wrote, “An armed society is a polite society.”

He may have been being ironic, sarcastic, or deliberately wrong, if he’d put the sentiment into the mouth a character we’re not supposed to like, admire, or trust.  No one thinks Shakespeare was suggesting we accept Richard III’s theories of statecraft.  Context is all, and Reynolds doesn’t give it.  Take any idea out of its proper context, where it had a meaning that depended on the facts and other ideas surrounding it, and no matter how great the idea was it’ll turn to gibberish.  I don’t trust Reynolds to recognize irony, satire, or any other form of humor.  And I don’t trust him to care what the quote meant in context either.

Lazy and dishonest thinkers aren’t fussy about actual meaning as long as a quote “sounds” appropriate or authoritative.

But I can’t judge Heinlein because I was never a fan.  I read two of his books when I was a kid.  Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road, and I only read the second because there was a Frank Frazetta-style illustration on the cover of a golden skinned woman warrior in very little armor and less clothing.  Someone who knows his work will have to tell me if Heinlein was being serious and in what way when he wrote that an armed society is a polite society.

However Heinlein meant it, Reynolds appears to take it literally and repeats it as if it was as wise and true as a verse from Ecclesiastes or a speech from King Lear.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise...but time and chance happen to the them all.

The worst is not, as long as we can say "This is the worst."

An armed society is a polite society.

Oh yeah, says Mr Wolcott.

"An armed society is a polite society." Think about that. Think about societies where the adult men routinely pack and tote arms.

Afghanistan. Yemen. The badlands of northern Pakistan (Bin Laden Country). The Sunni Triangle. Beautiful downtown Mogadishu.

Do these regions and cultures leap out at you as polite societies? Places where you could safely stroll for a nightly constitutional and enjoy vigorous differences of opinion that wouldn't break out in a misunderstanding between AK-47s?

Tierney’s column, the one that inspired Reynolds to reach for his commonplace book, is about how the wild, wild west wasn’t as wild as it appears on HBO’s Deadwood.

The show isn’t a documentary, did you know that?

Tierney’s column is inoccuous enough, for a Tierney column.  It’s a lesson in shallow conservative pundit tricks.  First Tierney pretends to have just discovered an idea that’s been kicking around for, oh, since Francis Parkman wrote The Oregon Trail.  The settling of the west wasn’t as violent and bloody and exciting as it’s been portrayed in dime novels, movies, and TV shows.  Then he pretends to be among the first to have recognized this idea, outside of a brave band of original thinkers and scholars, who happen to work for a conservative think tank and whom he quotes while forgetting to mention they work for a conservative think tank.  Next he pretends that Liberals are responsible for all the bad and down with people ideas his brave band of scholars is debunking.  And he finishes up with an attack on a strong, activist—which is to say Liberal—central government.  In this case, Tierney blames the Federal government for all the violence that occurred on the frontier, not counting drunken cowboys shooting each other dead in the streets in amusing acts of youthful exuberance.

Another Deadwood historian, Bob Lee, said that the best account of the two peak years of the gold rush, 1876 and 1877, lists only 77 violent deaths in all the Black Hills, most outside Deadwood, and most attributed to Indians, who were understandably angry at the invasion of their lands by both miners and troops under George Armstrong Custer.

The Indians saw that Washington's new interest in the Black Hills would be disastrous for them (a topic for a later column). Raiding was no longer costlier than trading for the settlers because they could now let troops do the raiding for them. Hobbes had expected war in the absence of government, but the West didn't really get wild until the feds arrived.

Erik Loomis points out that the feds usually arrived after the settlers and Indians had been killing each other for a while, and the Army’s main job was to get between the two sides and stop the slaughter.  Yes, I know, this usually meant expanding the slaughter of the Indians for a while.  I’m not arguing that our Indian policy was wise or good.  Only that the Army was there to stop the violence the settlers started.  It was the same with the arrival of the federal marshals.  Tierney’s other conservative given is that there was no need for the government to regulate private behavior because the settlers did it themselves, preferring to trade with each other rather than shoot it out at high noon.

It was Hobbes's prescription for "war of every man against every man," and he was echoed by newspaper predictions of a "theater of tragic events" in which "brute force will reign triumphant." But the miners peacefully worked out rules for delineating claims and resolving disputes so well that the system was adopted at later camps like Deadwood.

Roger McGrath, a historian who studied dozens of Western mining camps and towns, found a high rate of homicide in them mainly because it was socially acceptable for young, drunk single men to resolve points of honor by fighting to the death. But other violence wasn't tolerated, he said.

"It was a rather polite and civil society enforced by armed men," Dr. McGrath said.

This is true to a degree, as long as you ignore the fact that people getting together to regulate themselves is government, and that one of the ways the settlers enforced the rules they drew up was to invite the federal government in to do the job for them.  This was called “applying for statehood.”

As for guns being the silent arbititrers of trade disputes between individuals...

The West somehow ordered itself because individuals left each other alone, fearing that any other course of action would get them shot dead?  Boy, there’s a place you can’t wait to live, huh?  Safe and orderly as long as you don’t rub some short-tempered crackshot who’s having a bad day the wrong way.

Societies based on the rule of the gun are run by whoever has the most guns and the best shots on his payroll.  The rule of the gun doesn’t lead to a peaceable society of scared citizens with their hands on their sidearms, tiptoeing around each other.  It leads to rich bullies amassing private armies.

Tierney doesn’t seem to have heard of the Johnson County Cattle Wars, not to mention the warlords of Afghanistan.

The West was settled and civilized when the government came in and took everybody’s guns away—sometimes literally, but usually by making it unnecessary to carry a gun.

Dodge City wasn't tamed by ordinary citizens terrifying each other or even by organized vigilantes.  It was tamed by Bat Masterson and his professional police force, which included Wyatt Earp.  Earp was the toughest lawman Masterson ever worked with and the best shot and yet he apparently never killed a man until he got to the OK Corrall out in Arizona.  He didn't have to.  When Earp said, You're under arrest, people understood they really were under arrest.  There were too many consequences if you argued the point.  Good policing then was what it is now, a matter of making everybody believe they're better off not getting on the wrong side of the law---Judges and jails were as important to the deal as Earp's famous long-barrelled revolver, and all of them, the judges, jails, and the gun and Earp's hands were put there by the government.

So, no, Deadwood isn't a documentary.  Neither is My Darling Clementine, my favorite Wyatt Earp movie---Hour of the Gun, which stars James Garner as a darker, meaner, more historically accurate Earp, is my second favorite.  Tombstone with Kurt Russell as Earp is pretty good too.---Erroll Flynn's best western, Dodge City, isn't a documentary either.  But they are history lessons.

Both Clementine and Dodge City are symbolically accurate, in that they show the taming of the West being brought about by the arrival of government, in the persons of Fonda and Flynn who stand in for the many representatives of law and order who did the dirty work of civilizing the frontier.

In Dodge City we see what a society ruled by guns looks like.  It looks like Bruce Cabot and his personal army of gunslingers pushing everybody else around.  And then we see what a society ruled by government looks like---Erroll Flynn and his deputies making all the cowboys check their guns outside the saloons.

The sign telling new arrivals to town to check their guns here is really saying, "Here civilization starts."

Both Clementine and Dodge City show lots of settlers arriving in Tombstone and Dodge after law and order has been established, after there is working government.

Deadwood actually does portray the kind of society that Tierney thinks he's positing against the show.  A society of individuals basing their codes of behavior on making a buck and securing the main chance and enforcing their ad hoc government though private violence.

In a liberal society with a strong government you get Wyatt Earp.

In Tierneyland you get Al Swearengen running the show and Wild Bill Hickcock shot dead in a saloon.

(Acknowledgements and recommendations for further reading:  The quote from King Lear is one of Ratboy's favorites and he points the way to this post by Roy Edroso in which Roy sets out to compile a list of quotes that are true.  Roy explains:

Some quotes you like because they're poetic or amusing or charming. They sound good to you. Some, though, stick with you because they really reflect your beliefs, and have done so through whatever life experiences you've had.

Also, Blue Girl responds to Erik Loomis' response to Tierney, and Erik, who is a historian, takes on the supposed historians and scholars Tierney quotes in his column and exposes their agenda for a new conservative "winning" of the west.)

Film majors

I'm working on an overhaul of the old blogroll.  Mostly a matter of adding.  Don't expect to do any subtracting.  Gonna add a new category.  Gonna call it Film Majors.

Buncha people over there now with blogs that make going to the movies a matter of visiting their pages, they write that well, that passionately, that descriptively about the movies.  This is good for me because, as you know, I don't get to the movies much any more, at least not movies that aren't animated, based on a cartoon or a TV show or a comic book, and don't have any robots among their main characters.

Reading their blogs helps keep me imagining I have an interesting cultural life.

Now playing at the Mannionville Roxy we have, in addition to old favorite A Girl and a Gun:

Filmbrain.

cinetrix.

Motion picture, it's called.

And opening in Theater Five this week, Self-styled Siren.

The Siren is not someone you want to visit if you're compulsive about your NetFlix movie queue.

She is, however, someone you want to visit if you love old movies.  She has a quirky, sassy way of assembling lists too.  Check out her post Perfume at the Movies Strikes Back, a list of movies in which plot points hinge on perfume, or at least characters interested in each other's perfumes.  On the list are such sweet-smelling classics as Night of the Hunter and Diamonds are Forever.

Oddly, The Sweet Smell of Success isn't there.  Success must smell of Burt Lancaster's aftershave.

Good perfume quotes too.

The siren's devoted a second post to the subject, Perfume at the Movies Rides Again, which includes a nice synopsis of a funny scene from my favorite perfume-infused movie, My Darling Clementine.

  Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda, in one of his best performances) goes to the barber to get gussied up on Sunday because, we surmise, he wants to please the ladylike girl he’s fallen for, Clementine Carter. As Earp is leaving the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor, the barber chases after him with an atomizer that looks suspiciously like the Tin Man’s oil can left over from the set of The Wizard of Oz. “Sweet-smelling stuff, Mr. Earp!” he coos as he spritzes Earp’s coat and trousers.

Earp goes out to join his two brothers on the porch; they watch as the townsfolk of Tombstone, which Marshal Earp has spent the movie cleaning up, drive out to go to a church social. “It’s wonderful!” says Tim Holt, who plays Virgil Earp. “Why, you can almost smell the honeysuckle!"

"That’s me,” says Earp, in a voice that dares his brother to be amused. “Barber."

Plenty more over at the Siren's.  You can lose half the night exploring her site, and the rest of the night wandering around the others'.  And if that's not enough to satisfy your cinephiliac lust, I've already got a category on the blog roll, down toward the bottom, called The Virtual All Night Movie Theater.  So go.  Don't wait for my new category to officially open.  Treat yourself to a sneak preview.

I'll buy the popcorn.

TTFN---Ta ta for now!

Right now, the 11 year old wants to be a research scientist when he grows up.  The 9 year old plans on becoming an inventor.

If we all grew up to be what we dreamed of being when we were kids, there would be no shortage of firefighters, cops, soldiers, ballerinas, veternarians, teachers, pilots, and princesses, and I would be a cowboy.

I still think I was misadvised when I decided to give that one up.

The first career I ever really worked towards, though, as opposed to playing at and dreaming of, was...

Ventriloquist.

This is true.

I was 12.  I had my own dummy and I used to practice for hours in front of the mirror.  I got pretty good at it too.  You never see my lips move when I type, do you?  The hardest part, I found, wasn't keeping my lips from moving.  It was synchronizing the dummy's mouth with what I was having him say.  How many times should he open and close his mouth to say Ticonderogee-a?

I read books on the subject.  I wrote jokes.  I designed a real dummy, one whose eyes and head would move as well as his mouth.  His name was going to be Jeremy Flynn.  I found the name of a company that built ventriloquists' dummies and sent away for their catalog.  I knew just which dummy I would buy when 600 dollars fell into my lap.  I even picked out outfits for him to wear in the children's section of the Sears catalog.

I got ambitious.  I invented friends for Jeremy Flynn, other dummies I would have built.  I wrote scripts for a TV show starring Flynn and his friends and the long suffering human being they lived with and tormented, Lance Mannion.

None of my plans were original.  None of my jokes were original either, I'll bet.  I was modeling myself after Paul Winchell.

Winchell, I was convinced, was the best ventriloquist ever, and his wooden sidekicks, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff were the funniest dummies.

I stuck with ventriloquism for a couple of years and then something replaced it, I'm not sure what---model rockets, cartooning, girls...

Paul Winchell died the other day.

Before I heard the news, I probably hadn't thought about my days as a would-be ventriloquist in years.  In fact, since Jeremy Flynn and I parted ways I learned to admire Winchell more for his work as a voice actor.  He was famous for being the voice of Tigger in Disney's first Winnie the Pooh movies and TV series.  Say what you will about Disney's Pooh versus Milne's, Disney's Tigger was funny!  Sometime before our kids lost interest in Pooh, Winchell was replaced by Jim Cummings, and there was a noticeable fall-off in the quality of Tigger's dialogue.  His malapropisms and jokes became predictable and obvious.  Winchell must have helped write the scripts when he was doing Tigger.  That's spelled, T-I-double guh-urrrrr.

Winchell also did the voice of Dick Dastardly for Hanna Barbera and Fleegle on The Banana Splits.

Journalist and blogger Joe Gandelman didn't want to be a ventriloquist when he was a kid.  He wanted to be one when he was a grown-up.  And he became one.

And like all working ventriloquists, not just the 12 year old Lance Mannion, he was an admirer of Paul Winchell.  Joe's written a great post about Winchell and his own start in ventriloquism, which you should go read right here.

(Unfortunate update followed by good news:  Joe's having some problems on his page, which is preventing linking to individual posts.  Until it's fixed, to read his Winchell post you have to go to The Moderate Voice's home page and scroll way down.  The Linkmeister has let me know that Joe has included an update linking to this tribute by someone who knew and worked with Winchell and that post links to Winchell's own webpage.)

That's it for me.  TTFN!  Ta ta for now!

Oh, the wonderful thing about Tiggers

Is Tiggers are wonderful things!

Their tops is made outta rubber,

Their bottoms is made outta springs!

They're bouncy, flouncy, pouncy, wonderful balls of fun fun fun fun FUN!

But the really most wonderful thing about Tiggers is

I'M the only one!

Yes!

I'm the only one!

Hoo hoo hoo HOO!

(The link to Joe's post comes courtesy of Tom Watson.  Tom is now blogging over at the Huffington Post.  Way to go Tom!  His most recent Mukhtar Mai posts are up over there too.  The Heretik has an indispensible post on Mukhtar Mai up today too.

Also, one of my favorite bloggers, Blue Girl, has posted a tribute to another one of my favorite bloggers, Neddie Jingo.  I feel like I brought these two crazy kids together.  I'm so proud.

And Nance has added to our post at the American Street.  I was going to follow up, but Shakespeare's Sister chimed in with a comment that wraps up the discussion quite neatly and, not incidentally, proves that I don't know what I'm talking about, as usual.  Since I don't think I can top her, I'm going to leave things right there.)

Nance and Lance go to the movies

The Nance and Lance show is back at The American Street.

This week's topic:  The movies.

Not all movies.  Kids' movies.  We're batting around the question, Why are they so bad?

Our post is titled Ella Disenchanted, and here's the intro:

This week Nancy Nall and Lance Mannion go to the movies.

Or, actually, don’t go to the movies.

They take their kids to the movies, and that’s the trouble. Since becoming parents, movie-lovers Nance and Lance have found their movie-going options severely limited. Grown up nights out at the movies are a rarity. Long afternoons of having to sit patiently through the likes of The Princess Diaries, Racing Stripes, Madagascar, and Revenge of the Sith have replaced the kinds of evenings Nance remembers fondly.

“Dammit,” she says, “I miss the movies. I miss going to the movies. I miss discussing the movies afterward, with adults, over adult beverages."

Lance feels her pain, but he has an advantage over Nance when it comes to having to take the kids to the movies. He has boys. Nance has a little girl. And, says Lance, movies made for boys are far more enjoyable than movies targeted at girls.

Why is that?

This is our opening salvo.  I'm hoping Nance will follow up later with a good rant on what she hates about BRATZ. 

Annoy a Liberal. Drive like an idiot.

On the road yesterday afternoon, I got caught behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, Annoy a Liberal.  Work Hard.  Succeed.  Be Happy.

Nope.  Wasn't an SUV.

A Nissan Altima.

I pulled up alongside it and rolled down my window to yell at the driver.  I thought of yelling, Annoy a Liberal!  Be a sanctimonious, self-complacent prick!

Instead I opted for the mere accuracy of the moment.

"Annoy a Liberal!  Drive badly!"

Mr Hard Work and Success was weaving all over the road, his driver's side tires going back and forth between lanes because he was driving with---Look Ma!---no hands.

He was eating a sandwich---on a bulkie roll---and drinking a cup of coffee and steering with his knees.   His knees, not being able to see over the dashboard, couldn't tell that they kept steering the car over the white lines.

I'll bet if he'd had three hands he'd have been yakking on his cell phone too.  Maybe he had a speaker phone and he was yakking, talking with his mouth full on top of his other crimes against good manners and road safety.

Of course he also had a W in '04 sticker on the back of his car.  And I'm sure he never thinks about the irony of the party of hard work and success having as its current leader and hero the living definition of the word Legacy.  But then there were a lot of cars that sported Anita Hill Told the Truth and Vote for Bill bumper stickers in the 90s.

It's a Liberal argument that the personal failures of a political leader are irrelevent to the job he does leading his cause.

Conservatives are different only in that they believe that the personal failures of their political leaders are irrelevent.

So this guy probably doesn't see the two bumper stickers as expressing mutually exclusive ideas.

You aren't about to catch me attributing either this guy's bad driving or his sanctimonious self-complacency to his politics.  The worst driver I know is a bigger Liberal than I am, and sanctimonious self-complacency, not to mention prickishness, are bi-partisan afflictions, as conservative readers of this blog will tell you and have told me.

I do wonder, though, if he ever really thinks about the implications of his first sticker.

Clearly the message is that Liberals are against hard work and success, which I think is actually a plank in the Republican Party Platform.  I'd like to ask anybody who believes this if they accept the casual racism behind the sentiment.  They're talking about Liberal support of Welfare, of course, and when they say Welfare, they mean Welfare Frauds, which they assume is everybody on Welfare, and when they think of who is on Welfare they don't think of white people in rural St Lawrence County, New York, which at one time had, and may still have, the highest number of welfare recipients per capita in the state, or down in Alabama and Georgia.  They think only of black and brown people in New York City and East LA, whose natural laziness and shiftlessness are encouraged by bleeding heart Liberals, who really don't care about poor black and brown people, they just hate rich white successful people like the driver of that car and want to tax them into the poor house.

So Liberals oppose hard work and success.

Which Liberals though?

Think about the Liberals conservatives hate most.

Hollywood Liberals.

They can't say Barbara Streisand, Steven Speilberg, Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and George Lucas don't work hard and aren't successful.

They must mean the liberals they hate second most.

Trial Attorneys.

But it's hard work chasing all those ambulances, and their cuts from multi-million dollar settlements of "jaccuzi accidents" do pile up.

Nope.  Must be talking about their third most hated group of liberals.

Teachers and college professors.

That's more like it!  Here, they probably feel they're on safer ground.  Everybody knows teachers don't work hard.  Look at all that vacation time.  College professors are even lazier!  And since their definition of success is getting really stinking rich, then by their lights teachers are miserable failures.

(David Horowitz says that college professors are raking in the dough.  That must mean that the sentiment is indivisible.  You have to be successful while working hard to be annoying to Liberals.  Falling backwards into piles of money doesn't count, and, again, nevermind George W. Bush.)

Does this guy seriously believe that all Liberals are teachers, college professors, and welfare queens?

Maybe.

But probably he's totally oblivious to the real message of his bumper sticker and wouldn't care that it doesn't bear up under cursory analysis, because the bumper sticker wasn't a political statement.

It was what almost all bumper stickers are----statements of self-congratulation.

The bumper sticker is him just bragging.  He wants everybody to know he works hard and is successful.  It's gravy to him that the fact of his success might annoy other people.  He's enough of a jerk to think that inciting envy is one of the signs you are successful.  But this isn't a quality of his Republicanism or conservativism.  It's just a nearly universal fact of human nature expressing itself in a conservative.

Since human beings developed enough self-awareness to invent vanity, people have looked for the lazy path to heaven and earning favor from the gods just for the pleasure of indulging in their favorite past-time, thinking well of themselves.   People have always found ways to make the act of just being themselves a sign of superior virtue.

Calvinism did us a huge favor by turning this vanity into a religion.  The mere fact that you are you became a sign of God's blessing and proof you are going to heaven, even that in a way you have already arrived.

There have always been far more pharisees boasting about themselves to God at the front of the temple than abject tax collectors praying for mercy at the back.

It was Lee Atwater's genius---Karl Rove is just Atwater's most able and shameless apprentice---to make Phariseeism the central tenet of contemporary conservativism.

But there are lots and lots of Liberal pharisess too.  Lots of Liberals congratulating themselves on their virtue for having gay friends.  Lots of Liberal women careerists congratulating themselves on being rebellious Feminists.  Lots of well-off Liberals who can afford to buy a Prius to drive to and from their time-shares in the Hamptons congratulating themselves for their concern for the environment and all the other ways they are different from rich Republicans.  Lots of Liberals in Barnes and Nobles congratualting themselves over their chai for buying a banned book they've been meaning to read anyway during Banned Books Week.

Lots of Liberal bloggers congratulating themselves for the work they're doing saving the Republic by showing off on the Internet, and why are you holding up that mirror, do I have a smudge on my nose?

Or a beam in my eye?

You can buy a Liberal version of that bad driver's bumper sticker.  It says Annoy a Conservative.  Think Hard.  Do Good.  Be Happy.  Which doesn't even have the virtue of sounding sort of funny in a smart-alecky way like the conservative version.

I hope I never get caught behind a car with one of those on its bumper.

But if I do, and it's yours, and you're driving while eating a sandwich, talking on your cell, and steering with your knees, I won't care how hard you think, how much good you do, how goddamn happy you are!  I'm going to pull up alongside of you and yell at you, "Annoy a Conservative!  Drive like an idiot!"

Of course you probably won't be able to hear me over the guy in the car on the other side of mine yelling at me, "Pay attention to your own driving, you sanctimonious, self-complacent prick!"

See rule number three

Here was this man, unable as a clerk in Holy Orders to use any of the words which would have been at the disposal of a layman, and yet by sheer force of character rising triumphantly over the handicap. Without saying a thing that couldn't have been said in the strictest drawing room, the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn contrived to produce in Freddie the illusion that he had had a falling out with the bucko mate of a tramp steamer.

---from Bramley is so Bracing by P.G. Wodehouse.

Moving up day

Today was moving up day at the elementary school.  The sixth graders were officially declared seventh graders.  Now it's on to Junior High!

The Mannions were in the audience, including old Mom and old Pop Mannion who drove down this morning to see their grandson graduate out of childhood into adolescence.

This is a bigger achievement than you imagine.  It is a scarier step than it ought to be.  This is a braver boy than you would think just looking at him.

It was a great day.  To celebrate, his grandparents took him out to lunch at his favorite restuarant, which is not a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, or a Taco Bell.  It's a real grown up place.  Then he took some of the money he's been saving up and bought for himself some new Yu Gi Oh! cards, a big pack, a Structure Deck called Tales from the Deep.  He had some ice cream, too.  A great day for a kid who's earned it.

Congratulations, Matt.

Love,

Mom and Dad and Jack!

Comment etiquette

Updated.

Something is happening that I've looked forward to from the day I set up shop.

Comment threads.

It's been great.  I've been enjoying reading what people have to say.  But I guess it's time to set a few rules.

Rule number one.  You try to start a flame war, and your comment's gone.  Poof.  Just like that.

Rule number two.  You start calling other commenters names, you make assumptions about their character that you have no grounds to make except you're mad at that person and you know you're such a saint you don't get mad at anybody who isn't evil or stupid or both, then I will edit the comment.  If there's a point, the point will stay, the insults will go, and nobody will know you were a jerk except you and me, and I won't tell.  If there's nothing there but insults, see rule number one.

Rule number three.  Keep the cursing and profanity and vulgarity to a minimum.  I have kids reading this site.  My parents read it.  Intelligent people who can follow an argument without having key points highlighted for them by gratuitous uses of the words fuck and shit read this site.

Rule number four.  The rules apply to people who agree with me as well as to people who don't.  Maybe even more so.

Rule number five.  Read the post before you leave a comment.  Don't skim it.  Read it.  Read over the comments you disagree with a couple of times.  Make sure you understand what someone's trying to say.  Always give the benefit of the doubt.  People are writing on the fly.   In my experience running this page and reading other blogs, a commenter's anger is inversely proportional to his or her reading comphrehension.

Rule number six.  Nobody is impressed.

Rule number seven.  Steve Gilliard is not God.  Neither is Atrios, Kos, or any other blogger, liberal or conservative, you've somehow merged your vanity and ego with.

Rule number eight.  I know I'm an idiot, better than you do.

Rule number nine.  Helpful criticism and lively debate are the point of comments.  It is easy to offer the first and have the second while obeying rules number one through eight.

Rule number ten.  The editors of Lance Mannion Publishing and Aromatherapy Inc. reserve the right to enforce the rules whimsically.  Also the possibility that they are drunk, stoned, or operating on less than three hours sleep will affect all aspects of this blog at all times.

(Update reporting on the proposal of a Rule number 11.  Said proposed rule shall read:  "No one shall obey Rules numbers one through ten so carefully and scrupuously that the comments section begins to take on the air of a tea party of church ladies in the rectory parlor.  Rule number three shall be enforced with special laziness and inconsistency on the part of the editors."  Comments on the proposed rule change will be accepted at the town hall between the hours of 9 and 11 a.m. next Wednesday.  A map of the areas affected is available for viewing upon appointment with the town clerk.)

Will the last one out of Iraq please turn off the light at the end of the tunnel?

I have no idea what to do about Iraq.

I wish we could pull our troops out now, right now, bring them all home and be done with it.

But in order to argue for that it seems to me that I have to believe that our very presence there has become the problem, that we are making things worse by the day, and that something good for Iraq, or at least nothing worse, would come from our getting the hell out now.

Or that I have to believe that the lives of our troops are worth more than the lives of any number of Iraqis, men, women, and children, and what happens after we cut and run is not our headache anymore.

The second proposition is reprehensible.

But I'm beginning to believe the first.  The chaos is widening, our troops as they become more frustrated and demoralized will more and more see the Iraqi people, all of them, as their enemies, the insurgents' and terrorists' main recruiting motivation is to kill Americans and drive us from their country.  The civil war that seems inevitable, that really in fact is underway, may only be prolonged by our efforts to stop it and if we get out of its way the war will happen but happen quickly and decisively and be over in a short time, because right now we are fighting to prevent the majority from taking control of their own country.

It may be that more Iraqis will die from our efforts to stave off civil war than would die in one that erupts after we leave.  That's assuming, of course, that as soon as such a war is over Iraq will be quickly return to peace and the winners will not punish the losers.

Big assumptions.

It may be that while getting out now will have horrible consequences for Iraq, staying will have even more horrible consequences for the world.  The war is destroying our Army and has shredded our reputation among other nations.  Nobody we need to be scared of us is scared, or scared enough.  No countries we need to respect us and follow our lead do or will anymore.

But getting out might not change that because the man who ruined our Army and our reputation will still be President.

On the other hand, George Bush himself is an argument for immediate withdrawl from Iraq.  He clearly has no plan for the war except to hope that the insurgents run out of bullets, bombs, and bodies soon and he can declare victory, again, and bring the troops home for a lot of parades and some photo op memorial services.

Failing that, he is hoping that the American people will get tired of worrying about the war and forget about it until he leaves office and it becomes the next President's nightmare.

Making messes and leaving them to others to clean up is the defining story arc of George Bush's life.

Also, pulling the troops out now might make it harder for him to take us to war in Iran or Syria, which is something the Bush Leaguers are eager to do, if they haven't already started.

(Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister for the link to Seeing the Forest and Freiheit und Wessen.)

So I'm beginning to think cutting and running is the best of a lot of terrible choices.

But I'm not sure.  There are too many assumptions behind my feeling.  And quite possibly it is more a matter of wishful thinking than serious analysis.

On top of that, while I can make the case that getting out now is the best thing to do, it still doesn't feel like the responsible thing.

George Bush made the mess, but he made it in our name with most of the nation cheering him on.  It should be our job to clean it up.

The question is, Can we clean it up?

After the election I wrote a post praising John Kerry as a good man.  In it I said that at least Kerry would be spared the historical irony of having to be the one to ask some soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake.

I thought at the time that if Kerry had been elected, we would stay in Iraq longer.  I figured that George Bush was far more likely to find an excuse to declare victory and bug out, while Kerry would set out to solve the problem.  That's because of the biggest difference between him and Bush.

John Kerry is a responsible grown-up.

Of course, I didn't take into account the Bush Leaguers' ability to take any situation and screw it up even worse than it is already screwed up.  Bush hasn't been able to find his excuse to cut and run.   And Kerry, finding upon taking office just how awful things were over there, might have decided we had no choice but to get out now.

But that wasn't Kerry's plan.  Many Democrats and Liberals have condemned Kerry for not having been more forceful in his attacks on Bush's private little war.  I think, though, that Kerry couldn't bring himself to do that because he knew that if elected he would do what Bush said he was doing.  Kerry would have tried to bring stability and democracy to Iraq.

I believe his plan would have involved more UN cooperation, which he would have been able to secure, more regular troops, more support for the troops on the ground---including real armored Humvees---and a lot fewer search and destroy missions, so that even though we would have stayed, the casualty count, of both American and Iraqis, would have gone down.

At the time, this would have been the responsible thing to do.  I'm not sure it would have been a feasible thing to do.

It is looking less feasible every day.  But it still might be the responsible thing to do.

Which is why, although I am coming around to the position that we should get out as fast as we can, I am sympathetic to arguments that say that as fast as we can is very slowly, over a period of time that may be a matter of a couple of years.

Erik Loomis made such an argument a few days ago, and, as you probably heard, Steve Gilliard attacked him for it.

Gilliard didn't attack Loomis' argument.  He attacked Loomis.  Steve called Erik a coward, and then he got mean.

His commenters were less kind.

Rob Farley and Dave Watkins at Lawyers, Guns and Money have come to Erik's defense more ably than I could.  Rob comes through here, here, and here.  Dave's post is here.  And Erik has stood up for himself quite well.  He doesn't need my help.  But I just can't let it go.

Steve believes body and soul that the horror in Iraq is only going to get worse and we need to get out now or we will only contribute to making it worse.  He is furious at what the war is doing to the Iraqis and to the Americans over there, not just to our troops' bodies but to their very souls.  Only evil can come of our staying there.

But by the logic of his other argument, that only those who are willing to go over there and fight can argue for not cutting and running, no men over the age of 40 and no women of any age, because women cannot go into combat, have any right to argue for any other course except immediate withdrawl.

This is not a very practical way to run a foreign policy or a country---the only people who get a say in a matter are those whose lives are at immediate risk?  Unless we institute universal military service, this means that only the military gets to decide when we go to war.

And Steve and his supporters who are following his line that all young men who aren't for immediate withdrawl but who haven't enlisted are cowards should remember what Bobby Kennedy used to say was the only honorable course for young men during Vietnam.

Oppose the war and then enlist and go fight it.

Things get very tricky when you make an argument about quien is muy macho?  You call your own manliness into question too, and there will always be someone who has an opinion about that you won't much like. 

There is a big difference between arguing that we need to get out slowly while doing everything we can to save as many Iraqis as we can and leave them something like a livable country and cheerleading for war and more war, for staying there until we kill every last raghead whose mere existence scares you in your sleep and for expanding the war to Iran, Syria, wherever, to kill everyone whose mere existence frightens the bejeebus out of you.

We on the Left may be too quick and easy to accuse supporters of the war on the Right of cowardice.  The despicable thing about the likes of Jonah Goldberg is not that they won't enlist.  It's the positive glee they take in the killing and their absolute callousness towards those who are killed, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike.

On top of this, they glorify soldiering and dying for the flag then attach the glory earned by those who actually soldier and die to themselves.  They are pretend soldiers, sending others off to serve Jonah's vanity.

We can argue about whether or not that's just depraved or if it's cowardly as well some other time.

Steve Gilliard's accusation that any able bodied young man who supports the war but doesn't march right off to go fight is a coward is, however, not an argument.  It's not even meant as an argument.  It is a stick with which to beat able bodied young men into accepting his opinion.

Steve can make the case for immediate withdrawl without having to insult or belittle.

He can feel whatever way he wants to feel but he should remember what Bobby Kennedy would have said about able bodied young men who oppose a war.

Steve should also be aware that he undercuts his own argument by calling yellow on anyone who disagrees with him.

He is making immediate withdrawl the coward's default position.  "I'm too scared to go fight myself, so I'd better be for not fighting."

Liberals and Democrats have enough trouble fighting off accusations of treason and anti-American sentiment.  We ought not hand the Right the word coward to throw at us too.

They'll still call us yellow, but why make the mud pies for them and tell them which direction to sling them?

The Sidewalks of New York

Back when I was footloose and fancy free, bohemian in both outlook and practice, reading a lot of existentialist philosophy and Beat poetry, dating girls who wore berets and making them wear those berets in bed when we made love, I dreamed of living in New York City.

I used to dream of this while I was actually in New York City doing all of the above.  I was down there on a visit.  Many visits, actually.  At that time I had friends who lived in the East Village and they used to invite me down once a month for long weekends.  They lived on the same street as the New York City chapter of the Hell's Angels and every morning when I was visiting I would sit out on their fire escape with my coffee and watch the Angels down in the street working on their bikes.  "Safest neighborhood in Manhattan," my friends liked to boast.

Anyway, after finishing my coffee and waving to any of the Angels who happened to look up---I'd raise my mug in a good-natured toast, they'd give me a flick of the wrench in return---I'd go inside and sit down on the floor in front of a typewriter I had set up on a milk crate and write.  My friends were theater people---he was a director, and she was a composer and choreographer---and they stayed out late and slept late so most mornings I had the living room to myself.

Living room.  It was a wide hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen where my friends kept their TV, their bikes, and a narrow mattress they used for a sofa when I wasn't there and which was my bed when I came to crash.  Those mornings were some of the best mornings of my life.

Someday, I'd tell myself, or whichever of my friends' cats happened to wander by---for a guy who hates cats, I sure have spent a lot of time in their company---someday, I will live here and do this for real.  I will be a writer living and working in New York City!

There were days where I had myself half-convinced that I was.  I just happened to have to spend 24 or 25 days out of the month going to school out of town.

Home, if home is where the heart is, was the East Village.

That idyll lasted about two years and then somehow I wound up in Boston, then Iowa, then Fort Wayne, then Syracuse, and now here.

I never got to be a real New York writer.

That was a long time ago, and even while it was going on, my New York was a pretty small town.  I didn't get to know much more of the city than the Villages, Chelsea, Soho, a few blocks around Grand Central Station and the Public Library, and Shea Stadium.

So when I went into the City the week before last, to go to the Museum of Natural History with the 9 year old's third grade class, I might as well have been a hick from French Lick making my first visit to the big, bad city.

And that's why I have a question that will probably strike those of you who live in the City or who get into town regularly as a hick's question.

Where was I?

I don't mean when I was at the museum.  I know all about Central Park.  When the bus crossed the GW onto Manhattan and turned onto Broadway there, where were we?

Most of the businesses for the first ten or twelve blocks along Broadway had signs in Spanish and a lot of the people on the street looked Hispanic.  Was I in Spanish Harlem?  I thought that was down a bit and more to the east.  Many of the signs along the way made reference to the Dominican Republic.  Is there a Little Dominica?  And what are envios and llamadas and why are there so many stores offering them?  How stupid am I for asking these questions?

I have other and, I think, more intelligent questions.  How did all those business along the way get started?  Most of them appeared to be independently owned and many of them looked, if not new, then recently renovated with brand-new signage.  But considering the start up costs and the rent in New York, I'd have thought it would be next to impossible to get a little business up and running.

Also, despite the apparently thriving businesses in shiny new store fronts, the neighborhood did not look particularly prosperous.  The apartment buildings looked dingy and haphazardly maintained.  There weren't many signs of renovations going on (down by Central Park almost every other building had scaffolding around it and the streets were full of trucks and vans belonging to plumbers, carpenters, furniture stores, masons, glaziers, rug companies) and the FOR RENT signs on the sides of many of the buildings were faded and their messages a little too urgent.   Here's my question.  Why didn't I see more symptoms of gentrification?

In a heartening and grumpily gloating post on the dashing of Mayor Bloomberg's hopes for getting a new stadium for the Jets built in Manhattan, Roy Edroso describes New York as becoming: 

a City increasingly populated by transients: rootless careerists, and immigrants who do not plan to stick around

This jives with what I've heard and read elsewhere.  But I've been hearing it and reading it for years.  A lot of poor people barely scraping by, a lot of rich people with more money than they know what to do with throwing it around willy-nilly, and a real estate market that's completely insane.

So I'm wondering then, why hasn't gentrification pushed its way farther north?

Or am I being naive?

I know that a lot of former New Yorkers have been moving up this way, burdening themselves with hour and a half and two hour commutes, each way, in order to give their families houses to live in and lawns to play on.  The local paper had a story about a bus driver who lives in Middletown now.  If you live anywhere where Snapple is sold you probably know the guy.

He's the star of a new ad.

His name is Steve Mack.  He's been driving a city bus for 19 years, working out of the Brooklyn bus depot where Ralph Kramden supposedly clocked in and out.  He has the B43 route through Bedford-Stuyvesant where he grew up.  His mother still lives there.  Sometimes she comes out to a stop to wait for him and when he pulls up she hops on board to give him a kiss.

A casting director for the ad agency that has the Snapple account plucked him off a commuter train.

As Dianna Cahn of the Times Herald-Record tells the story:

It was late April, and Mack was waiting on the train from Hoboken, N.J., for his wife, Ramona. He was still in uniform. When she arrived, he stood up to give her the window seat and gave her a big kiss and a hug.

Mack didn't know it, but he'd just passed his first audition.

Sitting behind him was a scout from the Cliff Freeman ad agency. She asked him if he liked Snapple and wanted to be in a commercial.

"I thought she was pulling my leg," he said.

Snapple picked Mack for their ad because they decided he's "the quintessential New Yorker," even though he doesn't live there anymore.

Yeah, well, you can take the boy out of the City...

Mack told the paper, "Being a New Yorker is something that never leaves you. I was born and raised here. Most of my character was formed here."

He loves New York, loves his job, because:

...he gets to fulfill his grandfather's recipe for success: "to make your life better and make your neighbor's life better."

Part of his job, he says, is to get people to smile.

"It's almost like being a performer, being a bus driver," Mack said. "You get to be onstage. You are the focal point."

Besides, it keeps him coming back every day to his city, his old neighborhood.

"I mean, where else could a guy be minding his own business, waiting for the train home and the next thing you know, be in a national commercial?"

One of Mack's regulars stars in the ad with him.  The ad is part of Snapple's "Return the favor" series. People in the ads say nice things about Snapple, so Snapple finds someone to say nice things about them.  Charlene Threewits, a security guard at a methodone clinic whose daughter is also a bus driver, appears at the end of the ad to tell the world about why she likes riding Mack's bus.

"He's a sweetie. What can I say about him?  He got it. He got it. He's a little bit short, but he got it."

Couple of his other riders aren't so sure they like having a celebrity bus driver though.  Cahn overheard them talking:

"He thinks he's famous," said one female passenger sitting within earshot.

"His wife's not going to be able to get him to do anything," said another.

Anyway, Mack has been living in Orange County for the past 11 years.  His sons are in high school now.  And I understand why family guys like him aren't moving to whatever neighborhood it was I was spying on from the bus that day.

But where are the artists and the gays and the younger working people?

My friends left New York a long time ago.  They're no longer together.  He's in computing.  But she's still composing.  Their old neighborhood, they tell me, is way beyond their price range now, even with the jobs they have.  If they were young and starting out they wouldn't be living in that tiny apartment next door to the Hell's Angels.

Where would they be living?

I'm not pushing for gentrification.  Working people need to be able to afford to live in a city.  Without them and a thriving middle class, cities die.  The ones that hold on turn into large office parks and open air malls.  That's what I've been thinking has been happening to Manhattan.

I'm just asking because as were driving through the neighborhood I was looking around longingly and thinking---well, a part of me was thinking, the part that doesn't always remember he's stuck inside a middle-aged father of two---"I could live here!"

So that's my next question.  Could I?

Or am I dreaming?

(On a related note:  While Roy Edroso was enjoying the sight of Bloomberg's stadium deal crashing and burning, Tom Watson was cheering for the coming of a new ballpark for the New York Mets.  Tom's a fan so maybe his heart's guiding his head, but I'm with him when he writes:

Imagine the value of the New York Mets franchise in 2009, when a new stadium opens in Queens, and the Mets invoke their team option on aging but still-stellar ace Pedro Martinez, well over 3,000 strikeouts, pitching for a perennial contender, and owning much of the baseball-speaking population of Nueva York.

I can imagine it.  Or maybe I'm still dreaming.

And Scott Lemieux had some thoughts on the whole If We Build It, They Will Come and Build Hotels and Restuarants mentality behind the push for new stadiums.)

Morning Gazette---Hump day edition

Extra!  Extra!  Read all about it!

TOP STORY:  MUKHTAR MAI'S SITUATION IMPROVING BUT OUTCOME STILL UNCERTAIN.  BLOGGERS CREDITED WITH HELPING TO FOCUS MEDIA ATTENTION!

Tom Watson's two most recent posts on Mukhtaran Bibi are here and here.

Tom reports that she has been released from detention and allowed to return to her village.  No word yet on whether she will be allowed to make her planned speaking tour of the United States.  The pressure on the Pakistani government is increasing though, and, Tom says, people outside the blog world are noticing and crediting the bloggers who have tried to help out.

But then he asks the big question.  Nevermind the bloggers.  Where's President Bush on this?

Meanwhile, in other news:

BUSINESS:  WAL-MART STORE ANNOUNCES ALWAYS LOW PRICES, ALWAYS LOW WORKER MORALE!

Jaquandor has learned that some Wal-Mart store managers in West Virginia have decided that all employees need to be like firefiighters, on call 24/7, ready to dash to work at a moment's notice to cut those prices.  From now on out I guess we'll be seeing that little yellow smiley face wearing a helmet and turn-out coat.  The managers want their clerks and stockboys, even those who have been working set schedules for years, to now be available to work whatever shift they need them to work, no matter how this might disrupt their lives.  Employees who have a problem with the new policy will lose their jobs.  From the Charleston Gazette:

Several single mothers working at the store have no choice now but to quit, said one employee, who would not give her name for fear of retribution.

"My day care closes at 6 and my baby sitter can’t work past 5," said the employee, a mother of two who has been a cashier for more than three years. Neither of the services is available over the weekends, she added. "I have to be terminated; I don’t know what I’ll do."

One of the managers, whose name sounds like a mobster's nickname but which presumably is the name on his birth certificate, John Knuckles, says that employees shouldn't complain or resist, not if they have their priorities straight.

“We have many people with set schedules who aren’t here when we need them for our customers,” said John Knuckles, a manager at the store, which is located in the Nitro Marketplace shopping center and employs more than 400.

“It is to take care of the customers, that’s the only reason,” he said....

“It shouldn’t cause any problem, if they are concerned about their customers"...

Jaquandor has this to say about Knuckles:

I'll say this for the guy: he's got guts. There's no way you'd ever get me on record saying something like that.

MOVIES:  RED STATE SON SAYS BATMAN BEGINS WAY COOL!

Dennis Perrin, of Red State Son, took his son, Red State Son's Son, to see Batman Begins.  Not only was the kid impressed, but Dennis liked it too.  Good news for me because I've got to go see it this weekend.

Dennis reports something that I suspected from looking at the stills and trailers, Christian Bale is the best movie Batman ever, no contest:

Behind the mask Bale has the psychotic stare of a guy so haunted by guilt and extreme anger that he dresses like bat in order to find whatever peace there is left for him to find. Bruce Wayne's a twisted guy, and Bale is the first actor to show how deep Wayne's mania truly runs.

Red State Son's son's verdict:  "Totally cool."

SCIENCE:  WOMEN FAKE IT!  MEN SCOFF,  "NEVER HAPPENS WHEN THEY'RE WITH ME!"

Susie the Suburban Guerrilla declares "National Orgasm Amnesty Week."

Everyone needs to “come clean” about what’s working for them and have a frank, honest discussion with their partners.

Not that she expects this discussion to take place.  Men, she says, just refuse to believe that women can fake their orgasms, so what is there to discuss?

Oh yeah, replies Susie, then why do you think women laugh so hard at the deli scene in When Harry Met Sally?

The editors of this website have nothing to say on this question, figuring that anything they do say will get them into trouble.  One bold member of the team reports that he believes it because he himself has faked it on several occasions and that there's a good reason why his hero is a character from the second season of Sex and the City.

RELIGION:  BUDDHA, WISE BASTARD OR JUST TOO MUCH OF A SMARTASS FOR HIS OWN GOOD?  STORY CHALLENGES FAITH IN MASTER'S WISDOM.

Sean Carroll, physicist and blogger, re-tells a famous story about the Buddha over at Preposterous Universe.  The story is about how Buddha, asked by a grief-stricken mother to bring her child back to life, teaches her a lesson about the inevitability of death and the universality of grief.  It's a good story but, looked at another way, Sean says, it doesn't show the Buddha in the best of lights.  The Buddha is right, of course, but in this case you just can't help resenting him for being right.  Says Sean:

In the midst of great grief, the overpowering sorrow that comes with an unexpected loss, you aren't in any mood for pious teachings about inevitability and acceptance -- you want a miraculous escape, a for-real deus ex machina. Nevertheless, the miracles aren't forthcoming. Wishing for them is both perfectly understandable, and ultimately fruitless.

HEALTH:  BLOGGER SURVIVES STROKE SCARE AND TRIP TO THE ER. VOWS TO GIVE UP CAFFEINE!

David Parsons, of This Space for Rent, had a not very fun Saturday afternoon recently:

Around noon, I started to feel numb all down my right side, so after a quick consultation with my doctor, I was told to trot down to the nearest emergency room just to check things out, not that there might be anything (stroke) that (stroke!) might (stroke!!!) go (stroke!!!!) wrong. At 2pm, I showed up at the emergency room and told the admitting nurse what was wrong. At 2:20, I was brought into a triage room where I told the triage nurse what was wrong. At 2:30, I was escorted to the cozy room illustrated above, and settled in to cool my heels. At ~2:45, another ER nurse came in so I could relate my story once again. At this point, they'd probably decided that I was not having a stroke, so I got to relax until somtime around 3:15, when an ER doctor came in and listened to me describe what was wrong.

The doctor decided that David was going to live.  His problem was, surprise, stress, which the doctor then recommended that David abstain from in the future.  Easier said then done for the father of small children.  But it was the next recommendation that even thinking about causes him to break down in tears. He has to avoid caffeine!  He doesn't think this is humanly possible.

I'm a computer programmer, so I don't know what I'll do without my morning cup or 20 of tea. I suspect my corporate masters will find my comatose body curled up next to my desk in the middle of monday morning, and they'll be unable to stir me until the sun has had a chance to warm things up a bit (like, oh, around 2pm.) I'm glad that my brain isn't exploding more than normal, but, oh, this is a cruel cruel treatment for my illness.

Excuse me.  I'm going to go dump out the 8th cup of coffee I just poured myself.  More updates as they come in throughout the day.

Heaven is not like Westchester

For Blue Girl, who has been contemplating matters theological and philosophical lately, and for Trish Wilson, the married lady, who is a fiend of Dortmunder.

When John Dortmunder, a free man, not even on parole, walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that Friday night in July, just before ten o’clock, the regulars were discussing the afterlife. “What I don’t get,” said one of them, as Dortmunder angled toward where Rollo the bartender was busy with something far over to the right end of the bar, “is all these clouds.”

A second regular put down his foaming beerglass to say, “Clouds? Which clouds are these?”

“That they’re sitting on!” The first regular waved an arm dangerously, but did no damage. “You look at all these pictures, Jesus sitting on a cloud, that other God sitting on a cloud, Mary sitting on a cloud—”

“A little lower down,” suggested a third.

“Well, yeah, but the point is, can’t Heaven come up with furniture?”

As Dortmunder approached Rollo, he saw that the beefy bartender in his once-white apron was deeply absorbed in making five very complicated drinks in glasses Dortmunder had never seen before and would not have suspected the O.J. of possessing: curled, twisted, wider than deep, they looked mostly like crystal hubcaps, though smaller. But not much smaller.

Another regular, meantime, was objecting to the concept of furniture in the beyond, saying, “Whadaya want with furniture? Heaven isn’t Westchester, you know.”

A fifth regular weighed in, saying, “Yeah? What about all those fields of plenty?”

“Land of milk and honey,” added the third regular, as though it were an indictment.

The first regular lifted a skeptical glass and a skeptical brow to say, “Do they give out overshoes?”

What Rollo was doing with those glasses was just about everything. He had already sluiced in some crushed ice, and now he was adding some red liquid and some yellow liquid and some brown liquid and some clear liquid, all of them channeling around through the shards of ice and combining to form pools that looked like a lab test you didn’t want the results of.

The second regular was now saying, “What gets me is this fruitcake Muslim Heaven with the seventy-two virgins.”

“There aren’t seventy-two virgins,” the first regular objected.

“Well, no,” the second regular conceded, “not all at one time, but still, what kinda Heaven is this? It would be like being assigned to an all-girls’ high school."

“Ouch,” said the third regular.

“Can you imagine,” the second regular said, “what it sounds like in the cafeteria at lunchtime?”

The fourth regular, the one with something against Westchester, said, “Would you have to learn volleyball?”

This introduction of sports stymied everybody for a minute...

---from Watch Your Back by Donald E. Westlake

Way cooler than Katie and Tom

One of my favorite blog artists, Trish Wilson, got married today.  She and her long time partner tied the knot in her beloved garden.   She is now officially a countess.  Her husband has a title.  There's nothing to go with it, no castle, no stars and garters, no blood feuds.  But the title is real and now Trish is a countess.  Many of us think this is a step down for her, as we've always thought of her as a princess.

As I noted in the comments of her post announcing the happy occasion, Trish lives in Massachusetts.  Gay people are allowed to get married in Massachusetts.  Since gay couples have been getting married, Trish and her count decided to stop living in sin and make it official.  This puts the Right Wing Fundies' argument to rest then, doesn't it?  Gay marriage doesn't threaten straight marriage.  Gay marriage causes straights to get married.  Gay marriage is good for marriage!

There wasn't a cake at the wedding.  Trish served truffles.  She made them.  Presumably using this recipee.

Congratulations to the Count and Countess.  Please stop by and wish the happy couple well.

The day my great-grandfather got laid off from his job it rained

Came across my great-grandfather William O'Neill's diary this afternoon.  William was my mother's mother's father.  In 1903 he was a young man living at home with his mother in Albany, New York, working at a store the business of which has been lost to family memory, and courting Lucy Cavanagh, who became his wife and my great-grandmother.  He kept a daily journal and this is the entry for Saturday, June 20.

Rose 7.15

Store 8.00

Day rainy---

Laid off without notice---

Mr. Ryan's aunt dead---

Night rained very heavily.

(Something illegible) Freddie and Frank went to M(illegible) Dance---

Home 10.00

Retired 11.00

Wrote to Jemima.

That's it.  And you caught that, right?  His big news?  He lost his job.  Whatever he thought or felt about that he didn't say.  Nor does he say what he felt about poor Mr Ryan's aunt dying.  Nowhere in his journal does he ever say what he thinks or feels about anything, even his father's death.  It's probably wrong to call it a diary or a journal.  It's more of a log book.  He kept it in a pocket-sized memo pad with a leather cover that says in gold letters on the cover "Compliments of Remy, Schmidt & Pleissner, 22 & 24 White Street, New York."  Inside the cover it tells that Remy, Schmidt & Pleissner were importers of German linens.

"Damasks, napkins, table cloths.  Hem-stitched and fringed.  Sets and Doylies."

They also sold sheets and pillow cases.

I'm guessing William was given the notebook by a salesman from Remy, Schmidt & Pleissner who visited the store.  It's possible, though, that he acquired it somehow thanks to his girlfriend Lucy, whose family was in the restaurant business and may have bought their table cloths and napkins from Remy, Schmidt & Pleissner.  I'll never know.  I like to think she gave it to him and asked him to start keeping a record of his day for her.

William didn't record what he did at the store.  He didn't record many details of his life.  I wonder why he kept the log at all, unless it was to jog his memory for a real journal that was never written or never found by his children.  My mother never met this grandfather of hers.  He died in his 40s of Bright's Disease, when my grandmother was 16.  At the time he owned his own insurance agency, so being laid off from the store didn't ruin him for life. 

He was tall and handsome with dark curly hair that no one in the family has so far inherited, except for one of my mother's cousins.  My mother has a vague recollection that he was asked to be a fashion model when he was young.  He liked baseball and he liked to walk.  In his log he recorded the scores from ball games he saw and the routes of walks he took.  Some days he walked 20 miles at a stretch.

As many nights as he could he spent visiting Lucy.  He stayed at her house until 10 or 11.  Her parents must have liked him.

The day after he was laid off, Sunday, he wrote:

Rose 8.40

Allie came down

Went to St Ann's

Forty hours devotion

Rained very heavily all day Sunday---

Night fair---

Call to see Lucy---

Home 11.15

Retired 11.35

Wore new coat + pants

I don't know if he wore them to church or to Lucy's.  Possibly he wore them all day.  I wonder if Lucy liked them.  On another day he notes having worn a new straw hat that Lucy thought too "BIG."

I wonder what he told Lucy about being laid off.  It wasn't for cause, by the way.  On Monday he stopped by the store, probably to pick up his pay, maybe to see if he would be asked back to work, and he found that Conley, Miss Hulett and Miss Dwyer had been laid off too.  The business was failing.

Also that day he got a new key for his watch, saw his friend George, and took two long walks.  The second walk, with George, I guess, he called a constitutional.

Was he a happy young man?  Did he enjoy himself?  I think so.

Thursday, June 4.

Rose 7.15

Store 8.00

Day cloudy + smokey---from fire in mountains

Saw parade (circus)

Barnums and Bailey---

Mr Cochrane's boy lost---found (illegible) Wash Ave. + Park by girl

Taken to Fifth Precinct

Call to see George.

Went up to circus grounds.

Red lemonade made from sewer water upon the grounds.

Walked from there to So. Pearl---Mad(ison) Ave Lake Ave Willet Hudson Scott's---Hawk---

Home 10.40

Retired 11.10

But the best day in his log occured on Saturday, May 30, "Decoration day."  It's the only entry that comes close to having a narrative.

Rose on stroke of 5---

Had breakfast in Excelsior with Jack Keenan

Call by appointment with Lucy---6.10 am

To Lake George on 7.50 excursion train.  Met Lou's brother Ed (Lou being Lucy) and Mr Lamb on Sagamore---also Miss Hapin and Mr Frank at dinner which came after a long wait.

Frank Magelton (illegible) Funny fellow from Lake George.

Day delightfully cool and pleasant

Lake magnificent

Had an elegant time.  One of the best ever.

Home about 8.10

Had supper at Lucy's

Stayed awhile

Home about 12---

Retired at 12.15

Ringling Circus in town.

I like that, William O'Neill and Lucy Cavanagh at Lake George, having an elegant time.