Saturday, July 01, 2017

Reflect on the Fourth



Midsummer celebration of July 4, was casual and scattered in my hometown in my early years.

Fireworks were bootlegged and I don't remember parades after my uncle Roy Wilson died because he was the closest I came to World War I (Except that I was born just seven years after it--- and just 60 years after "THE WAH" between the states.) 

But in my family,, the first concept I had of July 4 was my grandfather describing a packed room of men in Philadelphia in 1776 (which might as well have been 1500 B.C.E. in my head. The way Vick told it, this was a collection of fairly literate gentlemen who were ready to fight their King for their personal and private "rights"s as well as their constitutional and international "Liberty". 

He mixed a metaphor so to speak because he characterized their collective sentiments as being the same as the indomitable Scot Richard Rumbold, who said just before he was hanged:

"I could never believe that some men were born Saturday and bridled and other men born booted and spurred to ride them..."

So I didn't have a desperate "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" feeling about the fourth as a child, that others absorbed. When I first saw James Montgomery Flagg's depiction of Uncle Sam, it excited me somewhat because it was so portrait- like.

I think it was my teacher Miss Berta McCurdy who told me that the original Uncle Sam was a New York businessman who sold beef to the Navy during the war of 1812 and all of the boxes were stamped U.S, and the Navvies christened him "Uncle Sam". 
                                               

                                        
We have always enjoyed fireworks and look forward to barbecue, especially after we learned not to use tomato essence on the cooking meat and to take it slow and easy starting out with hot ashes and ending up hours later with coals.  Homebrew almost frozen made the hours slide by.

An important point about July 4 is one my father-in-law  Ralph Pierce laid down: "Never buy or consume watermelon until after the Fourth !"

It shreds my soul and drowns my eyes when I know that somewhere in the United States on the fourth of July, someone will damage or destroy an American flag. There will be some selfish dystopian  oaf who will sit or lie on his belly and close his eyes during the Pledge of Allegiance.

I can't do anything about that. It will all grind down exceeding fine for them in the end.

It is for us the quick and living who feel safer and more free because of those gallant men who offered, on history's altar their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" in defines of tyranny, for us.  

Maybe, remembering, we can accept the debates that fuel the glue factory of legislatures, with the empirical evidence that Uncle Sam is the symbol for the longest surviving Republic and the most senior written and published Declaration of Independence and Constitution on this planet.

We do  not make this a priority  nowadays the way my Granddaddy did.   Who is going to value and salvage  America's tomorrows ?

Sunday, June 25, 2017

None So Blind


We are all aware of the old postulate that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over the same way, with the certainty that the results will be more rewarding in some  distant reputation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley pointed out that though his fellow "Chuck", Sen. Schumer, had been advised by Department of Justice attorneys as well as by intelligence directors that Pres. Trump was not, is not, and never has been the focus of  investigation regarding Russia influencing the 2016 election.

Yet because Schumer got that information behind closed doors he felt free---( if not indeed entitled) to  lie to the New York Times and CNN by continuing to claim that the probers had Trump in their crosshairs. Even after Sen. Grassley called him a liar and everybody within the DC Beltway knew about it, Schumer continued the practice.

When one of your liberal Democrat friends looks wanly in your direction and asks "why oh why can we not win an election anymore... We are zero- for-four since November..." You may reply, with impunity: "because your Party is crazy with liars for leaders and a conspiring truthless media".

The nearest you will ever get to balanced nonpartisan reporting on Washington in Washington is at THE HILL, where good investigative journalism thrives. They also have exclusive access to surveys by the Harvard/Harris group. (Lou Harris, beginning 70 years ago, wrote the book on polling methodology and statistics. And it goes without saying that Harvard University is not going to Kow-Tow to any right wing blandishments !  Here is an excerpt from the Hill:

Those are the findings of the latest Harvard-Harris poll, provided exclusively to The Hill, which paint a complicated picture of voters’ opinions about the myriad probes that have engulfed the White House.

Sixty-four percent of voters said the investigations into President Trump and Russia are hurting the country. Fifty-six percent of voters said it’s time for Congress and the media to move on to other issues, compared to 44 percent who said the focus should stay on Russia.

Of course, YOU could have told them that.  Even before Karen Handel whipped his Ossoff.  But the liberal DemonRats  have been in a bubble now for a long time...A bubble blown by the  Clintons and their entourage (Begala, Emanuel and McAuliffe)  and made opaque by the Obama era.

As this is written,  there are signs that some of them are scraping off the opacity, and seeing the rot of  Nancy and Lying Chuck.

But the smart money says the mainstream media giants will be the last to admit that everything since the summer of 2016   REALLY  DID  HAPPEN !