Jackson Hole - Horse Thieves and Celebrities; Cheap Beer and Overpriced Pretzels

We’d pulled into Jackson late on a Saturday night a bit disoriented, very hungry and too dog tired to worry about food.  Well the wife didn’t worry about food but I opted for some overpriced room service; but I repeat myself because room service is culinary grand larceny.  What we found in the morning when we headed into town was not the Jackson that I remembered from childhood when we visited on a family vacation.  Understand that I don’t have the faintest recollection of my childhood Jackson but I can state with positive certainty that my childhood Jackson was not this Jackson. I couldn't imagine that the Jackson that my parents brought me to was a haven for the 1 percent. 

In The Land of the Mustangs

The three ambled slowly along the hard scrabble trail, rocky white clumps that crumble underfoot and disintegrate into grainy sand; a landscape peppered with knots of spiny sagebrush.  Looking at the trio you feel desolation; a desperate loneliness;drifting as if looking for something or someplace but you don’t know what or where.  They headed for the ridge that would soon swallow them up taking them to..

A family group of mustangs stops at a water hole

Visiting the Founders' Dilemma

“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”  ~ George Washington

“21 Aug. 1805…bought a negro woman Lucretia Jame’s wife, her 2. sons John & Randall and the child of which she is pregnant, when born, for £180.”  ~ Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Book  

We traveled the Old Dominion from the northeast corner at Arlington over the state line from DC to the southwest corner at Abingdon, just a tobacco spit away from the Tennessee border.  Along our route we made house calls on some former presidents.  The presidents are long since gone but their homes, from Washington’s Mount Vernon just south of DC to Jefferson’s Monticello on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge, all remain in magnificent restoration.  Four of our nation’s first five presidents hailed from Virginia, George Washington (1) Thomas Jefferson (3) James Madison (4) and James Monroe (5) and we visited the homes of all four. 

 

Reproduced Slave's Cabin at Mount Vernon

On The Civil War Trail

“The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

~ Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative

Unharmed he reached the nearest sufferer. He knelt beside him, tenderly raised the drooping head, rested it gently upon his own noble breast, and poured the precious life-giving fluid down the fever scorched throat.

This done, he laid him tenderly down, placed his knapsack under his head, straightened out his broken limb, spread his overcoat over him, replaced his empty canteen with a full one, and turned to another sufferer. 

~ Excerpt of Confederate Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw’s account of the Angel of Marye’s Heights.

“And let the perpetual light shine upon them.”

~ My wife Cora.

We left Washington DC for a driving tour of Virginia.  Our drive crisscrossed Virginia's Civil War trails.  You can't hardly drive for a few hours in Virginia without coming across a site related to the Civil War.  If it isn't a building or a battlefield it might simply be a sign describing a particular spot as being some general's headquarters or a place where a skirmish took place.  The white signs are along highways, on country roads, near schools and on the fringes of shopping malls. 

Confederate cannons on the hills above Fredericksburg

Independence Day Musings

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ~ The Declaration of Independence

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

July 4^th, 2014.  After taking my usual sunrise run I was surprised, and disappointed, to see that my coffee house haunt was open at 6, the usual time for a weekday.  Not so disappointed that I boycotted coffee for the day but enough so that it gave pause to note that another holiday was passing with business as usual.  Workers were arriving at Home Depot to start the day and the Big Lots folks were putting out their Independence Day displays; sadly they aren't independent from work on what should be one of the most significant holidays in America’s calendar year.

It was 238 years ago that the Declaration of Independence from the British crown was adopted.  It was, for all intents and purposes already a done deal.  Two days prior the 2^nd Continental Congress had approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring independence.  And this certainly didn't mark the day that the colonists took up arms.  The revolution had been going on since April of the preceding year and the colonists had been raising bloody hell (As King George might have said) for some time before that.  The Declaration of Independence wouldn't even be signed until the following month.  But I’m splitting hairs, aren't I? 

Staring Down the Barrel of the Truth

Clearly America has reached the point at which she needs to look herself in the eye.  Look herself in the eye, take a collective deep breath and be honest with herself.  She needs to come to grips with the realities of gun violence and admit some simple truths.

A table of death at a gun show

Dinner at Mom's: 2nd Course - Fried Meat, Mushrooms, Politics and a Side Order of Fear

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?

Can't you see the fear that I'm feeling today?

If the button is pushed, there's no running away,

There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave,

take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,

ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. 

~ Eve of Destruction written by P. F. Sloan, recorded by Barry McGuire.

October 1964; probably 3 or 4 times in a month mom put fried pork chops on the menu.  Chops carried more fat back then and so it followed that they carried a hell of a lot more flavor.  Mom would put the pan drippings to good use and make a batch of cream gravy.  Nothing quite like pork chops and mashed potatoes in a bath of cream gravy.  It was the meat and potatoes diet that was starting to undergo scrutiny.  The medicos waved a bony finger at America and warned that fatty red meat, cream, butter and all that frying was going to clog the arteries and bring about a national cardiac crisis.  We were faced with the fear that our diet was killing us.

As so as we cemented our arteries, we watched the dour TV newsmen report on the upcoming presidential election. The GOP had nominated the conservative Barry Goldwater to unseat Lyndon B. Johnson who took office after JFK was assassinated.  It was the dual of initials; LBJ versus AuH2O (the chemical symbols for Gold and Water).  Johnson teetered on the Vietnamese fence by positioning himself as a pillar of war restraint who could still be tough on Communism. It might have been a hard sell against anyone but Goldwater.  The Arizona Senator's tough posture on the Commies translated to acute "hoof in mouth" disease with some propositions that scared the shit out of the electorate. His notion on dealing with Chinese supply lines in Vietnam was to clear them out with "low yield nuclear weapons."  I still recall the GOP campaign slogan touting Goldwater's conservatism, "In your heart you know he's right," being turned by the Democrats to, "In your heart you know he might" (launch a nuke) and "In your guts you know he's nuts." And so as we sat at the dinner table that forkful of dessert hung suspended as we watched with unease and then gasped at Johnson’s campaign ad; a little girl, a daisy and a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Oh yeah, we knew all about mushroom clouds.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were within my parents’ recent memories and as a kid I remember news footage of those boiling explosions. My grade school friends and I may have been too young to be concerned but we knew all about mega tonnage and we were in awe along with the rest of the world of the Soviet's gargantuan tests. I was 10 years old when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro had their atomic pissing contest. It was the Eve of Destruction that Barry McGuire would sing about two years later.

As kids we carried A-bombs in the backs of our minds.  We wondered if the destructive force of a nuke dropped on downtown San Francisco would carry as far south as San Mateo.  My friends and I would ride our bikes around the nearby College of San Mateo, often passing by the stairs that led down to the fallout shelter.  I seem to recall some sense of relief that we had a shelter so close, although in retrospect had the bomb been dropped when class was in session the shelter would have filled up with college students leaving the rest of us to go through the radioactive baking cycle. We knew all about the Strategic Air Command B-52s that hovered round the clock on the outskirts of Soviet air space to deliver retaliation in the event of of a Soviet launch.  We knew that fighter pilots on alert slept in the cockpits of their jets on the tarmacs.  When the sixties began we went through the bomb drills not really knowing what we were doing as we got into a tuck position under our desks.  We giggled and made faces at each other.  By the mid-sixties we probably started to question what the hell good a student desk would do in the midst of a nuclear attack.  Finally, by the end of the sixties as we entered high school we darkly joked that the tuck position was invented to be able to conveniently and easily "kiss your ass goodbye."  And yet there was this perverse fascination, an attraction to the images of nuclear blasts.  The vivid colors and the seeming grace in which the big cloud formed carried a strange and awful beauty. And then of course there was the awesome, hard to imagine power. We were transfixed, but really, who would admit to it?

Practicing to kiss your ass goodbye?

When I look back on the cold war I pause for a moment at 9/11; I recall the general fear that gripped our nation in the hours, days and weeks that followed. It makes me wonder how much fear our parents felt when they knew that destruction and death from above were just a few minutes away.  A nuclear storm could strike Oklahoma City with more destruction than a tornado and about as little warning; or a bomb could topple San Francisco as suddenly as a 7.0 earthquake.  If we kids could sense the danger of nuclear holocaust how much fear dogged our parents?  In some cases it was enough for them to build bomb shelters under the house and then be prepared to lock out the desperate folks who used to be friends and neighbors before the sky started to fall.

The images that left us in awe

In October 1963, just weeks before the election, my parents brought me with them to Washington Square in San Francisco to listen to Johnson preach peace in a stump speech.  LBJ concluded his speech by saying, “For 11 months I have tried to help us have peace in the world, and if I can have your help, if I can have your hand, if I can have your heart, if I can have your prayers, if the good Lord is willing, I will continue to try to lead this Nation and this world to peace." Johnson won the election handily but in the end it didn't work out so well; for LBJ or for America - at least not on the foreign policy front.

America sat at the dinner table that election year and was fed a diet of fear. By Goldwater, the fear of the Red Menace; by Johnson the fear of Goldwater. Not much has really changed has it? Candidates still serve up the fear diet; just in a different flavor.  Soft on Communism has become naive about terrorism. I feel fortunate that as a boy I had a connection to a different time, as my dad would relate to me the calm that FDR tried to deliver to an anxious nation; "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear is now a permanent ingredient in the campaign recipe. We'll never go back will we? Sad.  

Stump speeches.  I look back at LBJ in Washington Square as irretrievable nostalgia.  Presidential candidates don’t make stump speeches anymore.  They rarely come to California anymore but when they do it's with a purpose irrelevant to the election itself; Republicans know they can’t win here and Democrats know it’s in the bag.  So why would you come to the most populous state in the Union? To meet the people you hope to lead?  To deliver to the electorate your vision of hope for the nation?  Hell no. It’s to appear at a gazillion dollar a plate fundraising dinner.  They go out of their way to appear in front of friendly crowds because protest signs make bad photo ops and heckling a poor sound bite.  Politicians have lied through their teeth for ages.  In the old days you got to see them do it in person - for free, in a big city park.  Now you have to whip out the AMEX, or mortgage the homestead so you can listen to a fellow mortgage his morals at a private dinner in a rich guy's mansion.

And ironically, some fifty years after we were being told that our diet was about as healthy as a glass of hemlock, the stigma has been removed from red meat, starches and heavy cream.  Meat and potatoes have been repackaged as the healthy, salutary paleo-diet.  I suppose that if the diet experts ever tire of analyzing what we eat they can turn to politics.  They seem to be pretty good at flip-flopping and scaring the shit out of the public.
"Wife, we need to get off those damned grains and legumes.  They're killing us.  Whip me up a chicken fried steak with a an order of cream gravy and do it on the double quick"

When Movies Matter

“Epps asked me if I could write and read, and on being informed that I had received some instruction in those branches of education, he assured me, with emphasis, if he ever caught me with a book, or with pen and ink, he would give me a hundred lashes.”

~ Excerpted from the book 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, who could not only read, but wrote eloquently and passionately. 

Every so often a movie is released that is important more for its message than its entertainment value (and oftentimes they are still from an artistic point of view, excellent viewing).  Nearly always these films are historical dramas. 

Joining Mr. Lincoln's Army

What was it, the early 90’s when I saw my first Civil War reenactment?  Must have been the very early 90’s; maybe the late 80’s.  That's it; 1989.  When I heard that such things existed I thought, my God, where have they been all my life.  I’d gone through nearly 40 years and missed these things?

The National Civil War Association held the event on Memorial Day weekend near Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Revisiting 1863 in the hills that look down on the Silicon Valley.  There was some irony.  As we approached the site we were met by a sentry in the woolen blue of a Union infantryman.  Oh my, I thought, what a wonderful place!  I'd found a history buff's nirvana.

The Civil War Turns 150

As we prepare to commemorate another Memorial Day it occurs to me that we are in the process of marking the 150^th anniversary of the events that led to the creation of Memorial Day; The American Civil War. Many Americans are likely not aware that it was 150 years ago that their nation was sundered; torn apart by the politics of slavery and the clashing of two cultures which could no long coexist in this young, growing and developing nation.