Abbey Road, Helter Skelter, and Woodstock

For my birthday in 1969 my brother gave me Abbey Road, the Beatles next to last album. In the intervening years my children and then my grandchildren have become Beatles fans. My twenty-one year old daughter (yes, I have a child that young) has many Beatle tunes on her MP-3.  

I became aware of the Beatles in 1964 when they burst upon the American scene with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After that I heard their songs again and again on the radio and especially at work on the ship’s entertainment system. (I had been in the Navy about ten years by then.) I heard the songs so often I still know most of the words.

            At that time I was (and still am) a jazz enthusiast but I always loved rhythm and blues and then its offspring, rock and roll, but I looked askance at the Beatles. Who were these unkempt upstarts in ill fitting suits who needed a good barber and a competent tailor? But then the tunes won me over.

In the strictest sense the Beatles were more British music hall than rock and roll, especially by the time Abbey Road came along. “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Octopus’s Garden” are more music hall and novelty than blues or rock and roll. (“Come Together” now underscores a TV ad.) Earlier albums like the very imaginative White Album, from which “Helter Skelter” comes (more about that below), and beautiful songs like “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” established the Beatles as important 20^th century popular music composers.

            Also in 1969 American Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, giving Americans reasons to feel patriotic, especially with the anti war and racial turmoil that then plagued the cities. The year before, 1968, (the year the White Album appeared) had seen assassinations and riots in Chicago. 1969 was a slight improvement. Even Woodstock, that demonstration of mass debauchery still celebrated by aging flower children, was better than the hate America, anti establishment sloganeering that characterized earlier years of the decade. If I had to choose between stoned, mud-wallowing hippies and angry, rock throwing anti war demonstrators, I would take the former.

            That same year my brother, who gave me Abbey Road, was a recovery swimmer on Apollo 11, the shot that put an American on the moon. After a couple of deployments to Vietnam with the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, he went to work on Apollo, participating in three recoveries, 6, 10, and 11. He then left the Navy and with two others bought a thirty-six foot ketch and sailed the Caribbean for a year.

            Additionally, 1969 witnessed the murders of Sharon Tate and the LaBianca family, which were masterminded by psychopath Charles Manson, who claimed to have been inspired by the White Album’s “Helter Skelter,” the name Manson family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi gave his book about the murders and the trial.

            Manson’s fevered reading of “Helter Skelter” made him believe that the current national turmoil would culminate in a race war between black and white. That didn’t happen, but the 1960’s greatly accelerated, if they didn’t begin, the moral and cultural rot that has given the nation increased promiscuity, increased out of wedlock births, decaying central cities, the decline of respect for marriage and the family, the dumbing down of education, a popular culture that is an open sewer, and a President and a White House full of advisors whose ruling philosophy is informed by the decadent 1960’s.

            Except for Tate/LaBianca 1969 was festive, but forty years later we see the ugly result of 1960’s nihilism. I doubt the nation will ever recover.

This was originally published in the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee, on September 9, 2009

           

           

             

           

           

Traveling the World Searching for the Meaning of Life

     

In my youth I traveled widely across the world, most travel courtesy of the Navy. A jazz and blues enthusiast, I cultivated friends with the same interests. When our ships made port visits, we looked for clubs that played jazz and we found them everywhere. In Japan, for example, we heard musicians who could copy exquisitely the sounds and phrasings of American jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, not to mention the big band jazz and swing music of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Stan Kenton. And we enjoyed similarly talented jazz groups in other places.

            In October of 1960 my ship stopped at New York and I went to 52^nd and Broadway, to Birdland, a jazz club named for Charlie “The Yardbird” Parker. I saw two groups, one headed by drummer Buddy Rich, the other headlining Max Roach and Clifford Brown. I nursed a beer, bought a pack of stale Pall Mall’s from a pretty cigarette girl, and listened for hours to great jazz. That evening I was the only sailor in the crowded club and I had a great time.  

            I recalled all this after recently reading Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which became a cult novel for the Beat Generation. Why the book attained cult status escapes me, but I recommend it because it is well written and entertaining, a story of Sal Paradise and his immoral friend Dean Moriority, who travel back and forth across the US and down to Mexico City.

            Using the argot of the times Sal and Dean visit jazz clubs and cities to “dig” the music, the musicians, and the people, which for Dean is a search for a “pure sense of being,” in reality a religious search for truth and meaning in life. The improvised jazz solo provides this kind of experience. These solos, the kind one can hear only imperfectly on recordings – they must be experienced live – if done well by gifted players can carry listeners along from one point to another the way speaking in tongues carries Pentecostal listeners to their Beatific vision. G.K. Chesterton says that everyone is looking for God, even the man entering a brothel, and Dean and Sal do that too.

            I never found the Lord listening to jazz but I had a lot of fun hearing great music, much of which is now available on CD, and I had good friends like Kerouac’s Dean Moriority who took me from one near disaster to another until I finally decided to quit pushing my luck. I then found a good woman, got married, and had a family, becoming the kind of bourgeois conformist that Beat Generation writers and artists disdained and that spoiled 1960’s baby boomers ridiculed.

            In On the Road Kerouac does not celebrate the Beat life of immorality and nonconformity and does not write with the self congratulatory tone so common among baby boomers who go on and on about the debauchery (to them the great causes) of the 1960’s; he just tells his travel story.

            In fact, Kerouac, who died at age forty-seven in 1969, did not like the emerging 1960’s counter culture. Today, of course, a new counter culture has emerged consisting of religious conservatives who value tradition and the wisdom of the ages over Beat Generation and baby boomer hedonism. They know that Dean Moriority’s road to a pure sense of being and the baby boomers’ road to Utopia are roads to nowhere.

This was originally published in the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee on November 10, 2008 

           

           

Worse than Watergate

It looks like the Anointed One has changed himself into an ordinary hack politician (or else he always was one) like Chicago’s legendary Mayor Dick Daly, who helped steal the 1960 Presidential election for JFK and away from Richard Nixon. Nixon got even in 1968, of course, but that was only temporary. Although it took them almost six years, the red diaper babies who drank in Nixon hate with their mother’s milk finally destroyed him in the Watergate imbroglio of 1974. JFK’s plurality in 1960 was about 100,000, about 50,000 less than Algor’s 2000 margin, but Algor lost to the despised W. Bush when he was unable to steal Florida. Daly, on the other hand, was able to open the cemeteries of Cook County, Illinois, to provide JFK with enough votes to carry Illinois and thus to win in the Electoral College.

            But the hack politician, let’s call him the Real Obama, likely stole the 2012 Presidential election using methods more nakedly corrupt and flagrantly tyrannical than Dick Daly, who after all was just following old tried and true Democratic traditions dating back to the Founding. Real Obama discovered the IRS (for those who just got a job: IRS stands for the Internal Revenue Service, which collects taxes and puts you in jail if you don’t pay. They can take your income, your property, and your freedom, so always file and always pay what you owe. They are probably the most powerful and most intimidating agency of the Federal Government).

            Protected by an age-old tried and true Presidential stratagem called plausible deniability, Real Obama discovered that IRS functionaries can do just about anything they want with impunity. His agents found that Real Obama’s most effective political enemies – Tea Party activists, pro-life workers, conservative political action groups, and even people seeking the legal tax relief available to those adopting children – could be severely handicapped when their tax exemption applications were delayed with detailed, exhaustive questionnaires, some even asking people what books they read and even if they prayed and to whom.

            These IRS actions delayed fund raising for these groups until after the November 2012 elections. At the same time liberal groups with the same tax status were immediately approved. Had the IRS actions been even-handed no one could have accused Real Obama’s agents of political chicanery, but they weren’t. In this way the Romney campaign was denied the benefit of massive get-out-the-vote efforts of the kind that won Congress for the Republicans in 2010. Had the Tea Party and other groups been able to mount the same efforts in 2012, the outcome of the election would have been different and a President Romney would have been doing his own brand of political damage, which many of us prefer to the Democratic variety, even though neither party is anything to brag about.  

            In the wake of Fast and Furious, the IRS revelations, Justice Department harassment of AP and Fox News reporters, and the Benghazi scandal, Real Obama’s operatives have adopted tactics used by children in the cartoon series, The Family Circus.   In that cartoon whenever the children are caught in some mischief and asked to account for their actions, for example if something is missing or broken and their parents want to know who is responsible, they reply, “Ida No.” Experienced parents know that “Ida No” is a fiction. She doesn’t exist, but to Real Obama’s functionaries who testify before Congressional committees she is very much alive.

            For example, asked about who signed off on Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder replied, “Ida No.” He added that Ida No had recused herself from the case.

When asked if they knew anything about the IRS investigating only conservative groups during the 2012 campaign season, IRS officials Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller answered, “Ida No.” Then we had the alliteratively identified Lois Lerner (who had learned little) who headed the section that investigated tax exemptions: she took the Fifth, but before that said, “I didn’t do nuthin’ wrong, I ain’t seen nuthin,’ and I ain’t sayin’ nuthin.’” She doesn’t know Ida No.

            One of the charges against Richard Nixon listed in the articles of impeachment was misuse of the IRS.

During the Watergate brouhaha I occasionally saw this bumper sticker: “No one drowned in the Watergate,” a reference to Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne’s 1969 drowning, and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Unfortunately for loved ones and for the nation, Real Obama’s scandals have produced four deaths from the mishandling of Benghazi. 

            So, the Anointed One has lifted his disguise to reveal the Real Obama. Do his star struck supporters recognize him?

           

           

             

The Elephant in the Room

     

I recently saw video footage of the President surrounded by the heads of all the services; they had assembled to address the continuing and scandalous problem of sexual harassment in the armed forces. The elephant in the room, of course, was young women in the military serving in close quarters with young men. 

In 1954 at age eighteen I joined the Navy. My reason was the same as everyone else’s in those days: to serve one hitch to satisfy the military obligation and then to get on with the rest of my life. At that time every male between eighteen and twenty-six was subject to the draft.

            Just about every boy I grew up with in my neighborhood joined the Navy; one went to law school and then joined the Air Force. Another got kicked out of the Air Force Academy when he decided that love was more important than flying jets. He got married, which was not permitted in the service academies in those days. For all of my friends and for most young men of the 1950’s and 1960’s, military service was a major inconvenience, so I never heard anyone complain – because no one ever did – about being denied his right to serve, only about the requirement to serve. Most served honorably and after discharge bragged about it, but few young men either enjoyed service or stayed longer than necessary. When I decided to reenlist, no one could understand and some were rude enough to say I was wasting my life. That’s the way it was in the circles in which I grew up.  

            For reasons unrelated to the draft, a few women joined the services. In those days women served in administrative, clerical, or medical areas. At that time I never heard the phrase sexual harassment uttered by anyone because it was not a problem. Men and women lived separately and worked together only ashore in offices, hospitals, or clinics. Women did not serve on ships at sea or in field situations with infantry or other combat units. The armed services of those times recognized the wisdom of the ages. They did not mix hormone ravaged young men and young women together in situations guaranteed to create the problems now plaguing the armed forces. 

Why does anyone, other than pusillanimous admirals and generals and radical feminists who hate the military but want to make a political statement, think that sexual mixing in the armed forces is a good idea? What genius believes that putting healthy young men and women together in explosive, sexually charged situations is not going to cause problems? Who besides the god of political correctness benefits from these arrangements?

            I served twenty years in the Navy, many of them at sea on ships with cramped living and working quarters. At sea men live and work in very close quarters. They sleep one on top of the other in cramped berthing compartments, shower in communal showers, and perform other bodily functions, always in the presence of an audience. Worse, they behave as young men have always behaved. They make crude, bawdy, and obscene remarks and they play offensive practical jokes. For example, one time I returned to my bunk to find a balloon sized condom filled with water in the center of my mattress. Fortunately, I saw it. Had I not I would have had to sleep on a wet mattress for weeks until it dried. And everyone would have had a huge laugh. And that is by no means the worst of it. That’s the way men are. Why put women into the mix?

            Mixing young men and young women together under these circumstances creates huge management problems, which are now causing much hand wringing and consternation among the leaders of the services who serve the god of political correctness above all others.

            Young men by themselves cause enough trouble. When at sea as an independent duty hospital corpsman (a paramedic) I worked directly for the executive officer, the second in command. I saw him spend large portions of his time on personnel matters: sailors who got drunk and got into fights, sailors who got drunk and drove cars into either other cars or trees, sailors who got arrested, sailors who ran up huge debts with local merchants and then would not pay them, sailors who impregnated local girls and then refused to do the honorable thing, and so forth.

Adding women to this mix is idiotic. It increases the costs of operations and degrades readiness simply to satisfy Gloria and her progeny. Is there really a right to serve in the armed forces? Where exactly is it enumerated? Most of all, how do women benefit from the inevitable sexual harassment? Who benefits? No one; worse, women suffer, and the taxpaying citizens of the United States pay more for less.

             

           

           

Blowback: for every action...

     

Blowback (1) – the escape to the rear of a gun of gases formed by the discharge of a projectile (Funk & Wagnalls, 1963). In 1967 I knew a Marine sergeant at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, who had lost his arm in Vietnam when a 105 mm Howitzer “blew back” on him.  

Blowback (2) – the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions. “Blowback” was coined by the CIA after the end of the Cold War to describe the unforeseen and harmful effects on US national interests of unwise foreign policy actions. In this piece I broaden the term to describe other profoundly negative reactions to government policy, domestic and foreign.    

First, the attacks of September 11, 2001 were blowback from US actions in the Middle East; which included the continuing, unconditional and uncritical American support of Israel, especially in the light of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians; the US invasion and ultimate slaughter of thousands of Iraqi Arabs (most of whom were Muslims) in the first Iraq war in 1991; the post 1991 stationing of US forces near Islam’s holiest places in Saudi Arabia; and US support for repressive, dictatorial regimes such as Saudi Arabia. As Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul have said, “They came over here because we were over there.”

            Next, other historical examples of blowback abound: Jim Crow laws, lynching, and the widespread mistreatment of black Americans in the South were blowback from Lincoln’s invasion of the South, his war on civilians where Sheridan’s cavalry slashed and burned in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia while Sherman’s troops burned, raped, and killed their way to the sea in Georgia. And as if the war carnage were not enough, the US government then followed with punitive post war Reconstruction, rubbing Southerners’ noses in defeat. Reconstruction’s strongest champions were vindictive Congressional Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, who wanted to punish the South for defending themselves against the foreign invader. 

            Still another example of blowback from history: out of Mr. Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” also his war to “make the world safe for democracy,” came Adolph Hitler and World War II in Europe. With Germany’s defeat in World War I, European leaders insisted that excessive reparations be included in the Treaty of Versailles. Humiliating defeat and unpayable reparations created deep resentment among the German people, making them vulnerable to the demagogic appeals of Hitler.           

And incidentally, John Toland’s Infamy, which chronicles US actions in the Far East in the years before 1941, shows that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was blowback for ill advised actions by FDR and his State and War Departments.

At home, the vast expansion of organized crime throughout the nation was blowback from Prohibition, a well intentioned program advocated by early twentieth century feminists who saw families suffer as their working class husbands left their pay in bars on their way home from work. Clever criminals amassed great wealth by providing illegal booze to thirsty citizens.

            Then we have the blowback from forced busing for integration, which led to the destruction urban schools and the hollowing out of urban society. What was the rationale for forced busing? Housing patterns and neighborhood schools notwithstanding, segregation (de facto segregation) was bad; integration good; therefore, black children and white children must be forcibly mixed together in the schools. Predictably (predictors were called racists), forced integration was followed by middle class white flight from urban areas, followed closely by black middle class flight. Forced busing accelerated the creation of the permanent urban underclass, where poor blacks and other minorities now suffer from violent crime (check out the murder rate in President Obama’s Chicago), where seventy percent of children are born out of wedlock, and where single mothers live in poverty.

It is not unreasonable to assert that pre Civil Rights era urban black populations while worse off materially were better off socially and spiritually than they are now. For example, in the Washington, DC, where I was born and in whose suburbs I lived for many years in the 1940’s and 1950’s, there existed a strong and vibrant black professional middle class, successful black owned businesses, elite black schools like Dunbar, and full black churches every Sunday. Of course, the misery and deprivation many black citizens suffered during those years cannot be overstated, but they nonetheless had stable communities with low crime rates and a high number of intact families. The black out of wedlock birth rate in those years paralleled the white rate.

White House occupants of both parties often follow blowback producing US national security and foreign policies, thinking that unlike their predecessors they will achieve great results; they will fix things once and for a all. Domestic social engineers suffer from the same hubris. One can cite historical examples forever; nonetheless, pride filled leaders and their followers always believe, “This time things will be different” because unlike their historical predecessors, they will get it right.

Blowback is activist big government’s greatest scourge.

           

           

Guns Will Not Go Away

The current gun control debate reminds me of the Nicholas Cage film Lord of War, which accurately and effectively demonstrates, even though it’s fiction, that it’s not only America but the whole world that is armed. The difference is that in America citizens have a legal, that is, a constitutional right to be armed. At the beginning of the film, Cage’s character, an international arms dealer, states that there is an AK 47 Kalashnikov for every twelve people in the world. As a weapons dealer his goal is to arm the other eleven.  

            The AK 47, semi automatic knock offs of which are everywhere, was invented by a Russian sergeant (he was later made a general in the Soviet Army) and is one of the most ubiquitous and most reliable weapons of its type in the world. The Chinese company Norenco manufactures versions of the AK as well as other pistols and rifles, which are sold everywhere. The rifle shoots 7.62x39 bullets, which are available worldwide, but probably in short supply here since the Sandy Hook massacre.

            Recent history shows that the election of liberal Democrats, mass shootings, such as the Gabby Gifford incident in Arizona, the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, or the Sandy Hook shootings, and also inevitable hysterical and uninformed liberal gun control campaigns, are good for gun and ammunition sales. For example, when Bill Clinton became President in 1993, 7.62x39 semi automatic rifles as well as 7.62x39 cartridges sold rapidly because gun owners feared that Democratic gun grabbers would enact confiscatory gun controls. There followed the semi automatic assault rifle law, a failed attempt to limit magazine size (to ten rounds) and assault weapons sales. Chinese gun makers quickly got around that law by merely making a few cosmetic changes to AK-47 style semi automatic rifles; moreover, thousands of large capacity magazines remained available.

            Later on gun and ammunition sales returned to normal and did not change until the election of Barack Obama, another liberal Democrat who gun owners feared would push for new restrictions on gun ownership, hence ammunition and gun sales exploded and the prices of both rose dramatically.

            This history shows that Americans are not fearful of each other but of government restrictions on gun rights. The rush to buy guns and ammunition after Mr. Obama was elected was not a fearful, hysterical exercise, but a rational decision based on the anti self-defense history of liberal members of the President’s Democratic Party.

Boston and the Joy of Running

In 1969 I was an overweight, out-of-shape, two pack a day smoker who could barely put one foot in front of another without getting winded. I was a Navy submarine sailor who did little other than eat, sleep, drink coffee, smoke, read in my bunk, and stand my watches. Worse, food on submarines in those days was plentiful and very good.

            But then I heard William Talman, the actor who played prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason television show, tell the world in an anti smoking television ad that he was dying of lung cancer. He pleaded, “If you don’t smoke, don’t start, and if you do, quit.” This was five years after the Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of smoking. After the report I had tried from time to time to quit but had failed; but when I heard Talman I turned to my wife, also a heavy smoker, and asked, “How many more people have to tell us?” Talman died a few weeks later.

            After hearing Talman I threw away my cigarettes, replacing them in my shirt pocket with chewing gum and a list of people who had died of smoking related disease; prominent on the list were Talman and the great Nat “King” Cole. Every time I reached into my shirt pocket for a smoke I found the list and the gum. I would read the list and then tear off a small bit of gum. After about a year I no longer needed the list or the gum.

            In addition to quitting smoking, I started to run around my neighborhood in the evenings after work, or when I was at sea and visiting another port, around the streets of that port. For the next four years I ran all over the world, from Plymouth, England, to Barcelona, Spain, to the banks of the Firth of Clyde in Scotland. In 1970 I was transferred to the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. and was able to run at sea in good weather around the main deck topside. It was a short run but I did many laps. One evening as we  steamed north of the Arctic Circle, the ship’s Executive Officer saw me running in the gray Arctic dusk and after that called me “The Arctic Flash.”

            From 1969 until 2007 when plantar fasciitis put me on an exercise bicycle, I ran continuously. After leaving the Navy in 1973 I ran in many 10K fun runs at various places. The most enjoyable race I ever joined was the annual Charlie’s Surplus ten mile run through the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts. That was a festive occasion, with the race route closed to traffic and the streets lined several feet deep with cheering people. As in other such races, families and loved ones assembled at the finish line to welcome and congratulate finishers.

            All of this came to my mind on Monday, April 15, 2013, after the terror bombing during the Boston Marathon. Probably the most important of all long distance races, the Boston Marathon gathers runners from everywhere. Many recreational runners train for Boston and the fortunate ones who qualify follow the world class runners who usually finish in less than two and a half hours. The rest take from three and a half to four hours.  But it is a high honor and a great feeling to finish Boston. I have never done a Marathon but I know from my Worcester experience what it’s like to run in a festive atmosphere.

            I was and continue to be deeply saddened by the events of April 15, 2013, because some of the nicest people I have ever known I met at fun runs. At one time I belonged to runners’ clubs in one place or another and would often join 10K or longer fun runs on weekends. The camaraderie among runners before and after the races was an experience I will never forget.

            We should pray for those who suffered on April 15 and celebrate long distance runners everywhere.