Jan21

Great War Wednesday: 1915 — Year Two

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1915The Christmas Truce was long past as were the balmy days of autumn 1914 when the cream of Europe’s youth marched off to war singing “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary,” “Les Marseilles,” and “Deutschland Uber Alles” all safe in the knowledge that the war would be over by winter just as their generals promised. Mons, the Marne, and First Ypres had given the lie to that overly optimist tradition. With the cold of January 1915 came the beginning in earnest of the trench warfare so iconicly associated with our notions of the First World War. Movement along the front ceased and what followed were months of bloody, muddy, and fruitless carnage.

1915 is a bit of the redheaded stepchild of the Great War. It doesn’t have the claims to newness of 1914 or the major meatgrinding battles of 1916 that followed. Truthfully, the year gets short shrift often in works on the war. However, it would be a mistake to think nothing happened in the twelve months between 1914 and 1916. This was the year of the failed French offensives in Artois and Champagne. It was the year the Canadians arrived in Flanders near where a lonely mound of mud called Vimy Ridge waited.

This was the first year of the submarine. Immediately after the war began, Great Britain flung a blockade around the German ports and slowly began cutting off supplies from the Kaiser and his army. While the German High Seas Fleet remained bottled up in port, the unterseebooten were able to slip past the great grey warships of Britain’s Grand Fleet and begin unleashing havoc in the north Atlantic. At first, the u-boats practiced unrestricted warfare and sank anything in sight; unfortunately for the Kriegsmarine, U-20 sank a great prize on May 1, 1915 . . . The RMS Lusitania. The deaths of nearly 100 American passengers aboard the liner woke the sleeping giant and though swift and obsequious German diplomacy soothed the great beast for awhile, she would doze but fitfully for just a few more years before striding across the Pond to defend the country which birthed her.

Belgian troops with early, crude gas masks.

1915 also marked the first use of arguably the most infamous weapon of the war when the Germans opened cylinders of poison gas which then drifted languidly and deadly across the fields of the Ypres salient to begin the Second Battle of Ypres. Before long, all the combatants rushed in a headlong sprint to develop newer and more effective gasses to kill one another as well and better gas masks to keep their own casualties to a minimum.

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Artist David Collin’s beautiful rendering of the Red Baron’s Albatros D.V

The men in the trenches during the early months of 1915 began hearing a strange new sound far above their heads as the first aircraft designed specifically for warfare and aerial combat took to the skies. All throughout the beginning of the hostilities, both sides were using the newly developed airplane for scouting and artillery spotting, but somewhere along the line, some enterprising jake carried a rifle aloft with him and started taking potshots at spotters from other countries. Then someone else took a few grenades up on a mission and began chucking them over the side once they reached the enemy trenches. Before long, both sides had developed planes with forward mounted machine guns and the world of fighter combat opened and in that world, no citizen was a greater star than Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen aka “The Red Baron” who would begin his storied career in 1915.

As a result of the actions taken by the so-called “young Turks” of the Ottoman Empire, 1915 would see the introduction of a new word into the lexicon of warfare and international law — genocide. For the first time in modern history — depending greatly on when one begins counting “modern” — a government actually turned its military and full resources on its own people, not to quell some rebellion or restore order following a natural disaster, but to exterminate a hated minority, in this case the Armenian Christian population. The “forgotten fire” of the Armenian Genocide would later fuel another madman’s idea to exterminate another hated minority population and lead to yet another word — Holocaust.

Finally, 1915 would see the emergence of a future master of puppets arise in Great Britain. First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill would mark his entry onto the world stage with a brilliant idea to end the war. With trench warfare so entrenched along the Western Front, he proposed moving the area of attack somewhere else. His strategy involved redirecting massive numbers of troops from Great Britain and the other Commonwealth nations such as Australia and New Zealand from France and Belgium southward across the Mediterranean to the Dardanelles in order to attack what he referred to as, “The soft underbelly of Europe.” The place the troops landed would give its name to the ensuing campaign and the campaign would give Lord Churchill his walking papers from the Admiralty and very nearly political life in general. The name of the chosen landing zone?

Gallipoli.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Jan19

On Snipers

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Earlier today, documentarian, social commentator, and bad film maker Micheal Moore enraged some and emboldened others when he declared the late Chris Kyle, subject of the current box office front-runner American Sniper, was — like all snipers — “a coward.” I believe Mr. Moore to be incorrect in his assessment of military snipers; while I do not ascribe any particular courage to snipers, I am certain they are in no way cowards. In fact, of all the combatants on the modern battlefield embroiled in modern warfare, snipers know better than any other the true face of war and its unfathomable costs.

Long years ago, warfare was bloody, smelly, claustrophobically close, and violently personal. In ancient times, men would stand in the heat of a summer day hacking at one another with swords, spears, and axes of copper, then bronze, then iron. A soldier saw the face of each opponent he killed. Often he would leave the battlefield soaked in blood and gore which was not his own, but belonged to his foes . . . or his friends. War was serious business.

Beginning in the Medieval period, however, the distances between combatants changed. Longbows and a little later crossbows lengthened the battlefield from face to face out to a couple of hundred yards. Unquestionably men would still finish the day with sword and axe in hand to hand combat, but the archers and crossbowmen firing in massed formation seldom saw the person who fell pierced to the heart by their projectiles.

Then came firearms and the game evolved dramatically. Now men stood at distance and blasted at one another with muskets while their compatriots in the artillery corps shot cannonballs through the ranks opposite them. Some military historians debate if the smoothbore musket was a great improvement over the longbow in terms of accuracy and rate of fire. One thing is certain, the Brown Bess took much less training and practice than the yew stave stringed with gut cord so common people rather than warriors started becoming more active participants in war.

Long about the American Revolution (sure, leave it to the Yanks) though, some enterprising gunsmith rifled the barrel of a musket. Now, instead of a range of a football field, a man with good eyesight could shoot an opponent through the vitals at over 400 yards. Thus were the first snipers born on the battlefields of North America.

From the beginning, snipers have been a hated group. The British during the American Revolution repeatedly wrote about how “unsporting” and “barbaric” the rag tag American riflemen were for refusing to stand in neat ranks and march resolutely towards another line similarly arrayed whilst shooting at one another all the while. The early Kentucky rifle carrying militia men were hated, but they lived to shoot another day . . . and they taught the British the folly of those bright red uniforms with the big brass buttons.

Ever since rifles became widespread in combat, every military — at least in times of war — maintained units of snipers. Sometimes, they were professional hunters or of similar occupation allowing excellence with a rifle and superior marksmanship. Later, men would train in the art of sniping. No matter what their background, however, it was (and remains) the sniper who carries the tradition of the personal, bloody killing of the ancient battlefield.

Today, snipers don’t carry an assault rifle capable of spraying down jungle and plain alike with hundreds of rounds in a blink. Snipers don’t have the conscience clearing luxury of blindly firing during battle at some movement and later being able to say to themselves, “Maybe I didn’t kill anyone.” Snipers KNOW they kill people. It is what they are trained to do and every time they look through their telescopic sight atop their high powered sniper rifle and pull the trigger, the SEE the target — the person — crumple and fall. Combat for snipers is ALWAYS personal, even if it may not necessarily be close.

On the battlefield, snipers are always certain of one thing — if they are captured, they WILL be summarily executed. EVERY army kills enemy snipers unlucky enough to be captured, “international laws of war” be damned. Captured snipers are killed out of hand for one simple reason — RAGE. Nothing on the modern battlefield is as terrifying as a trained sniper. If you get killed by a mortar round, it was your time. Shot during a firefight? Same thing. But sitting quietly eating an MRE and your buddy’s head explodes next to you like a pumpkin dropped from the roof? You know he died because a MIND, a THINKING person deliberately WANTED him dead. Snipers rob an army of its peace even in the rear area.

A sniper can change history with one pull of the trigger, or one shot not taken. For example, in 1777 at the Battle of Brandywine, British sharpshooter (sniper) Capt. Patrick Ferguson had an unusually tall, American officer in his rifle’s iron sights but he chose not to shoot the man because the officer had his back turned and it wouldn’t have been very “gentlemanly.” That tall officer was George Washington. Imagine how different the American Revolution might have been if Ferguson had pulled the trigger.

So, to answer Mr. Moore simply, “no, snipers are not cowards; they are soldiers.” Of all soldiers save medics, the sniper knows the blood of war most intimately. He is a hunter of men; a killer of men. A killer, but not a murderer. The sniper kills those who would kill him, his friends, and his fellow soldiers. I’ve personally known two snipers and also heard Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock speak at a dinner I attended. None of them bragged about the men they had killed. They did what they were trained then instructed to do, just like Capt. Paul Tibbets of the “Enola Gay.” They put sights on a man, pulled the trigger, and watched him die. I can’t imagine a coward being able to do that.

Love y’all. Keep those feet clean.

Jan9

Who Did We Have Supper With?

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question-mark3aSomething passingly strange happened to me earlier tonight. Budge and I parked at the Fatz on I-26 in Clinton to meet up with our Brown friends (their surname is Brown; they aren’t actually brown) and take charge of our fuzzy niece while they go to Indiana for a funeral. After making the exchange, of Nyah, best wishes for safe travel, and hugs all around, Budge and I decided to go ahead and eat supper at Fatz instead of traveling back to Simpsonville to eat locally.

Now as we had driven up the entry road to the restaurant, I noticed a guy with a backpack looking thoroughly unkempt making his way up the same road. By the time Budge and I got Nyah settled in her doggie bed in the backseat of the Santa Fe and made ready to go in and eat, this guy had reached the front porch of the restaurant and was sitting at the far end on a bench staring into space and rocking like a metronome. I could tell he was probably one of the legion of homeless that wander our roads here in the South this time of year. Since southern winters tend to be much milder (not this year) than the same season up North, our homeless population spikes between early December and late March as the dispossessed abandon the frigid cities above the Mason-Dixon Line.

hobocat

Hobo sign language for “A kind lady lives here”

I need to pause here to explain something. The need to feed hungry people runs deep in my DNA, both spiritually and ancestrally. Mama grew up beside the state highway and the railroad tracks that ran through Gray Court and apparently word had gotten around in the hobo jungles that my Granny Imogene was a woman of culinary skill wedded to a spirit of boundless compassion. Every so often, Mama would relate to me, a soft knock at the back door signaled a hungry mouth had found the one house in town where he was certain to obtain food. If it were around meal time, Granny would offer a place at the table, which the men (and they were always men in those days) invariably declined. Instead, they would head back towards the railcar with a paper sack full of baloney or egg sandwiches, some cookies – homemade, never store-bought – and some fruit if any was available.

My sainted Granny Wham also had a soft spot for the hungry. One famous story in the family tells how Daddy brought two boys home with him on a long weekend pass. The two were Yankees and had no way to get North and back in the allotted time, so Daddy drove them home with him. Two days later as the trio made their way back to base, both those Northern boys said, “Frankie, one more day and your momma would have killed us with food!” It wasn’t an exaggeration either. As far back as I remember, the first thing Granny Wham would ask me after her welcoming hug would be, “Are you hungry?” In fact, she was notorious for mentioning to me that I should “try to lose a little weight because all that fat around the heart wasn’t healthy” but then — usually in the same breath — asking me, “But do you want a little piece of pound cake? I made it just for you.”

So tonight seeing such a downtrodden looking fellow all alone, a little voice way down deep inside me urged me to feed this man who was probably hungry. I checked with Budge to make sure she would be okay with it and with her blessing, I went to fetch him inside. I walked up to him and asked him if he was hungry. He paused in rocking for just a moment, looked at me and slowly nodded his head. So I told him to come on in and have a meal with my wife and me. When he stood up, the air around him caught on the wind and nearly brought tears to my eyes, but I was raised to never look down on someone less fortunate so I took him by the arm and led him to our table. At that point, things got a little . . . odd.

He scarcely spoke and when he did, it was nigh impossible to understand him. We did manage to figure out he wanted a Sierra Mist to drink and the steak and ribs with a salad for his meal. I offered him some of the amazing rolls Fatz serves before their meals, but he just stared at the basket and went back to his slow, methodical rocking. All of our salads arrived and he was mannerly while eating. He chewed with his mouth closed and when he coughed, which was often, he always covered his mouth with a napkin.

Before our entrees arrived, however, I noted some quirks in his appearance and behavior that raised my threat antennae to maximum sensitivity. First of all, his hands were immaculate. The nails looked almost manicured with no chew marks, no hang nails, and no cuticles protruding from the sides. Also, not a single nail had the slightest bit of dirt underneath it. I don’t want to make stereotypical generalizations but I’ve met a great many homeless both men and women and one thing they almost all had in common was a pair of grubby hands. It’s not a knock against them; it’s just a fact of the lifestyle. This gentleman’s hands were cleaner and better groomed than mine, by a long distance.

Also, his backpack was gleaming. It was a leather model trimmed in brass and it looked like it had just arrived from L.L. Bean. The brass was mirror-like and the dark green leather looked buttery smooth with no scratch, wrinkle, or stain anywhere visible. He also never took his foot off the straps, but I didn’t set much store by that because anyone on the road soon learns to maintain contact with one’s stuff or quickly lose it. Altogether though, the hands and backpack didn’t fit with the rest of his appearance from the wild, unkempt hair to a beard and mustache worthy of Santa Claus to the rest of his ill-fitting, roadstained attire.

What really set me to wondering and made me slide a tiny bit closer to Budge though, was his gaze. He never stopped rocking and his eyes never stopped darting left to right then up and down. He seemed to be searching for something, but even as his eyes ceaselessly roamed around the dining room, his face remained an impassive, blank mask . . . except when his eyes would fall on Budge. Every few circuits around the room, I would notice his eyes boring a hole into Budge. She had initially tried to be pleasant and include him in the conversation, but finally stopped looking at him altogether and it took me just a moment to see why. Every time his eyes stopped on Budge, he would linger and stare and his face would flinch ever so slightly into a predatory leer. It made the rest of supper somewhat awkward.

As soon as we finished our meals, I sent Budge to the car to “call Laura and tell her we were running late” while I made one final attempt at communication. I never got his name, but he mumbled something about being from Kentucky. When he did, I asked him if he was from western or eastern Kentucky and he replied, barely understandably, “Western” so I asked him if he lived near Harlan County. He said he did and I knew it was time to part ways . . . Harlan County is almost as far EAST as you can go and still be in Kentucky.

I paid the check and left the waiter a generous tip for dealing with this surreal experience. My dinner companion mentioned, again, barely audibly, that he needed a new pair of shoes. Normally, I’d have tucked him in the car, taken him to WalMart, and gotten him some decent footwear . . . but not this time. I pressed a $20 into his well-groomed hand, wished him luck, and got in the car with Budge to leave. When I looked back, he was going back into the restaurant; why, I don’t know.

If I had it to do over again, I’d still brought him in to eat. My favorite Bible passage is in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus said that feeding the hungry and giving water to the thirsty was the same as waiting on the Son of God Himself. I’d get the man’s food again because it was the right thing to do. For the first time, however, out of all the myriad times I’ve tried to help someone, some stranger, this was the first time I didn’t feel the usual sense of accomplishment. Instead, I felt a little worried. Budge thanked me profusely for extricating her from the situation because she was completely skeeved out within ten minutes. She knows my heart and how much I long to help everyone I can, but like I told her tonight, no attempt at a good deed trumps her safety . . . she comes first — always.

So I’m left wondering — just who did I treat to supper tonight? Some of the stranger’s mannerisms — especially the rocking and nervous flitting of his eyes — reminded me of the autistic children I’ve been blessed to work with from time to time. I don’t know. I am nearly certain, though, that he was either mentally ill in some way or putting on a really good act. It makes me think I served a meal to either a very grubby angel in disguise or a highway wandering serial killer . . . and I wish I was joking.

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“Jesus the Homeless” by Timothy P. Schmaltz

Love y’all. Keep those feet clean, and I don’t usually ask for comments, but if any of you have some insight into this odd occurrence, I could use some perspective.

Dec29

2014 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Dec26

Don’t Go “Into the Woods”

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If the dead are cognizant of what occurs in the land of the living, then somewhere in the Great Beyond, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm are weeping bitter tears along with Monsieur Charles Perrault. The reason for their sorrow is the travesty of a movie which purports to be based on several of their folk and fairy tales. I am speaking of the train-wreck that is Into the Woods.

The TL;DR version of this movie review is, “that’s two and a half hours of my life and $22 I’ll never get back.”

To go a little more in depth, the movie was oddly reminiscent of fingernails on a chalkboard. If a warden in some American prison happened to force the inmates under his control to view this film, he would be brought up on 8th Amendment violations before the ending credits rolled. If any of the nine SCOTUS judges have seen the movie, the plaintiffs wouldn’t need to go through any appeals process because the offended judge would likely issue an immediate writ of certiorari and declare original jurisdiction over the case. It really is that bad.

First of all, it commits the mortal sin of being a musical on screen. Musicals, with only a handful of exceptions, belong on a stage, not on a screen. Furthermore, if the movie is going to test the snake infested musical movie waters, it should at least have memorable songs eg “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria,” “Memories,” or “Cell Block Tango.” None of the ditties making up the score of Into the Woods is the least bit likely to become an earworm. Of course, what the movie lacks in memorable songs it makes up for in interminably LONG songs — think “Freebird” or better yet “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” For instance, the first number lasted at least twenty minutes. Exposition has no business being sung.

Secondly, the movie itself is entirely too long. I counted at least three good points where they could have rolled the credits and ended the audience’s misery. The film clocks in at 124 minutes running not counting coming attractions and believe me, after the previews, it was all downhill. The last third of the production is an unending series of ham-handed attempts at an M. Night Shymalan style twist ending and I’m talking Lady in the Water, not Sixth Sense.

To make matters worse, I simply could not feel anything for the characters. Whenever I started to develop a tiny bit of genuine connection or sympathy for Cinderella, Jack, or Red Riding Hood, the character in question would burst into one of those godawful songs and whatever goodwill I’d managed to dredge up evaporated “like snow in the glance of the Lord.” Over and over again something would happen that was completely inexplicable. For instance, why would Meryl Streep’s witch burst into the bakery and tell the baker and his barren wife about the curse she placed on the house when the baker was a baby? What’s the point? Is it supposed to be like, “I’m a witch and now I’m going to be a bitch, too?”

Speaking of characters, Johnny Depp needs to fire his agent, get into rehab, or do something else to stem the tide of truly hideous movies he has “starred” in lately. Depp is a fantastic actor when he’s playing a character worth playing such as Captain Jack Sparrow or Edward Scissorhands, but recently, he has managed to sign on to some serious stinkers. I can only imagine he is in some sort of horrible debt and has large, sweaty men in cheap suits threatening to break his kneecaps so he has to take whatever drivel comes along. What else can explain Dark Shadows, The Lone Ranger, and now this groaner? Thankfully though, Depp has little to do in this film. If you remember Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Deep Blue Sea or Steven Segal in Executive Orders, you know what I mean.

Finally, I’ve sat through some terrible movies. Maybe one day I’ll relate my experience with the artsy-fartsy film Prospero’s Books which remains the worst movie I’ve ever seen and I endured it in its entirety, In the case of Into the Woods, however, the only two things which kept me from walking out twenty minutes in and cutting my losses were the facts I was with my extended family whom I love dearly AND Budge had the car keys. Otherwise, I’d have bolted long before the giant showed up.

So, avoid this movie, keep your feet clean, and remember I love y’all!

Dec24

Great War Wednesday: The Christmas Truce of 1914

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The London Times from January 9, 1915: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches”

“Had he and I but met
      By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
      Right many a nipperkin!

     “But ranged as infantry,
     And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
     And killed him in his place.

     “I shot him dead because —
     Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
     That’s clear enough; although

   “He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
   Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
   No other reason why.

    “Yes; quaint and curious war is!
    You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
    Or help to half-a-crown.”

Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”

Men in their natural state show little inclination to go off and kill one another. The taboo against homicide is so ingrained within us that those who would be soldiers have to undergo desensitization to killing and interestingly enough, one key way of doing this is using violent video games, but that’s a post for another time. As a society we have labels for those who like to kill or enjoy killing or aren’t even bothered by killing. We call them psychopaths or sociopaths or simply “monsters.” Some studies of combat troops have found as many as 1 in 5 soldiers never fired their weapons during battles in which they participated. It seems despite all the sensational novels and television shows, even in the face of The Fall and our broken human natures, enough of God’s image remains within most people to cause severe distaste and discomfort when faced with taking the life of another Image-bearer of our Creator. Few events throughout history show this proclivity towards peace more clearly than the spontaneous Christmas Truce of 1914.

Ever since August, Tommy, Pierre, and Fitz had been killing one another on an industrial scale from the border of Switzerland to the English Channel. What began as a war of movement now degraded into a stagnant morass of trench warfare with misery compounded by machine gun fire. By the time Yuletide came around, men on all sides realized they had been lied to — the war certainly would NOT be over by Christmas. So it was along the Western Front as the troops hunkered down in their muddy trenches on December 24, 1914 and prepared to spend the most miserable Christmas Eve of their lives cold, damp, and utterly devoid of cheer. Then, something changed.

By most accounts, the Germans started the affair up around Ypres by singing Christmas hymns and lighting candles. As the strains of “Stille Nacht, Heil’ge Nacht” drifted across the shell-pocked moonscape of No-Man’s Land, a few adventuresome Brits climbed atop their trenches to listen and then join in. When they didn’t tumble back into the trench with holes through their heads from snipers, more soldiers climbed out of their burrows to join in the singing.

At some point, accounts say, some German lad attached a bit of white cloth to the top of a small evergreen tree, climbed out of his trench, and walked towards the British.  When he didn’t fall to an Enfield round, more of his comrades joined him. The Brits, realizing this wasn’t a ruse, climbed out and the two erstwhile enemies met in the midst of the barbed wire and shell holes between their trenches.

Their first action was to gather up the dead, some of whom had been lying unattended for weeks, and carry them back to the rear for proper burials. That grim work accomplished, the two groups began some tentative conversations and the spirit of Christmas took over from there. The troops began exchanging small gifts — the English had a surfeit of tobacco; the Germans an abundance of chocolate — so these two commodities rapidly changed hands. Some men exchanged caps or buttons or whatever trinkets seemed to interest the other party. They sang more carols together. In some places up and down the front a game or two of football — soccer for the Yanks — broke out. As the old cliche’ says, “a grand time was had by all.” Then, some hours after the festivities began, it ended. Both sides embraced and returned to their trenches with the knowledge they would soon begin the unsavory work of trying to kill one another anew.

Officers on both sides were appalled by the impromptu ceasefire. They knew actually meeting the enemy and seeing he had a regular face and neither horns nor fangs made killing said “enemy” much more difficult. Orders went up and down the chain of command. The Christmas Truce of 1914 would be the last for the duration of the war. The enlisted were threatened with court-martial or worse should any of them be so silly as to attempt such a humane action ever again. The old men who send the young men to fight and die for the wars the old men started had spoken.

Still, for a brief shining moment in the midst of Satan’s playground, the Prince of Peace reigned supreme. The joy of Christmas stopped the mouths of the artillery and silenced the bark of rifles, if only for a time, proving for anyone who cared to ponder on the topic that peace is stronger than war if only men would embrace the light.

Love y’all and Merry Christmas! Keep those feet clean during these celebrations.

Dec21

O Come All Ye Faithful!

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https://i0.wp.com/www.industryleadersmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/BLACK-FRIDAY-shoppers-1024x593.jpgIt’s time for Christians to stop griping and moaning about the commercialization and secularization of Christmas. For years I’ve endured rants and whines about how society has “taken Christ out of Christmas” and “no one knows what the season is really about anymore.” Both those statements are a load of reindeer droppings.It’s time to face facts and get the record straight.

First of all, “church going folk” need to understand how impossible it is to take “Christ” out of “Christmas.” Christ is not a name; it is a title. Jesus of Nazareth’s last name wasn’t “Christ.” He didn’t even have a last name unless it was bar-Joseph since He was supposed to be Joseph’s son. The title “Christ” means “the one who saves” and “Christmas” is a Latin contraction of sorts roughly translating to “Celebration of the one who saves!” With that in mind, Christ is just as much a part of Christmas as ever. Christians are just incensed it’s not the Christ THEY want celebrated. A Christ is celebrated from mid-October right through December 25, which brings me to my second statement.

EVERYONE knows EXACTLY what the season is really about and they are celebrating it like it’s 1999, to quote Prince. Here in America, Christmas is about one thing — SPENDING MONEY! That’s right! The Christ being celebrated for the entire last quarter of the year is America’s Savior, the Almighty Dollar. Jesus hasn’t been dropped from the holiday; He’s just been relegated to what is deemed His proper place in our society — Church, and then only on Sunday.https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR6HXP6BQKZzt36r4kATe8ovgcV6r56h13Pw9lcSzeXCZGCFKhL

Just look at where Christmas is celebrated. Both China and Japan have huge Christmas seasons and neither one of those countries is even remotely Christian. China is officially atheist and Japan, if they are anything, are Shintoist with a good does of Buddhists. India has held on to some of the traditions left by their former British Empirical rulers by celebrating Christmas even though the country is overwhelmingly Hindu.

Face it, Christmas hasn’t ever really been a pure Christian holiday anyway. No Scriptural evidence points to Jesus’ birth being in December (or whatever the Jews called December). A bunch of Christian missionaries decided they wanted to find a way to get more pagans to convert to their new religion and since everyone likes a holiday and parties, they co-opted several of the pagan’s holidays and put a Christian whitewash on them. Almost everything about the traditional celebration of Christmas has a pagan origin. December 25th was originally part of the Roman Feast of Saturnalia which just so happened to include gift giving and parties.

Christmas trees are as pagan as Thor’s hammer. They call back to the Druidic, Germanic,and Viking celebrations of Yule or Midwinter’s Day when the Winter Solstice finally passed and the days started getting a little longer in those cold northern climes. It’s the same with the lights and candles. They have pagan overtones, too. Oh, and long before jolly old Saint Nicholas of Turkey became famous for delivering presents around the Christmas holidays, the god Woden would visit the faithful and bless all good men. Mistletoe, the bough under which couples try to stop, is STILL the most sacred plant to those who follow the Druidic customs and religions today. Of course, I’m not suggesting we do away with Christmas like some dour, bitter old Puritan. I just think Christians need to realize we stole all those customs from the ancient pagans and now the modern pagans have taken them back. Isn’t that fair? Aren’t we supposed to be all about “fairness” these days?

I realize, however, we need to make some changes to reflect the new Christ the world — especially America — worships now at Christmas. I think the best place to start is the classic nativity scene. Sure, we can keep the nativity in Pagan Christmas. Instead of a creche representing a barn, it’ll be a miniature storefront and instead of a star on the peak it’ll be a neon sign flashing Wal-mart, Target, or Costco. We’ll take out Joseph and replace him with Warren Buffett or maybe Bill Gates. Mary can ONLY be replaced by America’s greatest current spiritual advisor — Oprah Winfrey, but if one can’t find a suitable figurine of her, just substitute Angelina Jolie since so many people look up to her. Of course, with same-sex marriage and rights being so vital to our society, one may want to skip the lady characters altogether and have Bill and Warren.

https://i0.wp.com/everydaypr.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Santa-Nativity4.jpgThe wise men will still come from the East. Some of them will ride with Deepak Chopra or Shirley Maclain, but most will arrive in traditional middle eastern garb from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Qatar. Instead of camels, they’ll be in their oil-wealth bought luxury Mercedes and Rolls Royces. Both groups will represent oil interests with the latter being crude oil and the former being of the snake variety.

We’ll need shepherds and who are more like shepherds today than our slew of pundits and talking heads? We’ll need miniatures of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilley, and Rush Limbaugh . . . that last one may be hard to find in “miniature.” They’ll be on one side of the creche with the rest of the Fox News clan while the other side will be balanced out by a group of poll-watchers from MSNBC. We’ll have a few angels even. Put some wings on Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus and let them flit around. They angelic chorus can be the Victoria’s Secret Angels since they seem to already know the part.

Finally, we’ll have to have some livestock, and I suppose that’ll be us. After all, we’re the sheep who follow these people. Like cattle we line up in front of stores Thanksgiving Night and prepare to shop til we drop instead of waiting until Black Friday like our ancestors were wont to do. It’s only when those cash registers and credit card machines start ringing and dinging that the real sounds of the season take to the air!

Now some of the quicker ones in the crowd may have noticed I left out a key figurine from the new nativity scene. Who do we put in the manger? I thought about that for awhile. At first, I thought a stack of $100 bills might be the best representation of our new savior. I pondered maybe a smartphone with several shopping apps open and promising great deals, but finally, I decided to leave the manger empty. After all, that’s what we’re really worshiping in our praise of the Almighty Dollar — emptiness. So rather than force the issue, let’s leave the manger empty, just like our hearts tend to be all throughout this new pagan Christmas season!

Love y’all . . . really. Now keep those feet clean.

Dec12

The Lunatic Is On The Grass

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“You in the mood?” “Nope. You?” “Not a chance.”

We are doomed as a species. Not as a civilization or a nation, but as a species. Our exit from the Earth is not assured by some comet bearing down on us nor will some accident in a biological lab unleash a super-virus to take us out. We have nothing to fear from Nibiru Planet X, nanotechnology, or grey goo. We are doomed to emulate the dodo for the same reason the giant panda dozes towards extinction — simply put, we have become too stupid to live.

Allow me to explain. The Giant Panda is easily one of the most recognizable animals in the world. It is a national symbol for the People’s Republic of China; it serves as the hidden logo of the World Wildlife Fund. It is a fuzzy, fluffy ball of black and white adorableness beloved the world over and it is rapidly moving towards extinction partially because of habitat loss, but mainly due to a huge decline in birthrates. The decline in birthrate is most troublesome because biologists can’t find a really good reason for it other than the fact that pandas don’t seem much interested in mating!

China has set aside a HUGE tract of land — larger than many countries — just for pandas to live in. Only government biologists are allowed to enter the preserve. Anyone else trying to get into the preserve gets SHOT by the unit of the CHINESE ARMY guarding the place. Several major zoos all over the world have dedicated breeding programs for giant pandas, but the pandas aren’t giving birth often enough to sustain the species. In case it’s gotten by anyone, Giant Pandas basically have two jobs in the world these days: eat bamboo and make baby pandas. That’s it. Unfortunately, it’s too much for them because the entire panda species has lost its collective groove.  Folks, I don’t know if anyone will agree with me, but once a species can’t manage enough libido to keep the population viable, it’s time to just let it go. That species has gotten too stupid to live anymore.

So have we.

I have proof.

“Dear lord! Run away, run away!

Last night, Budge and I were listening to the local radio station playing all Christmas music all the time when the John Tesh Show came on. John is apparently famous for something; don’t know what and don’t care, but it is enough to land him a radio gig weeknights from 7 – 10 during which he broadcasts little snippets called “Intelligence For Your Life.” One segment last night did it for me and any hope I have we are improving as organisms. He said researchers at some top university labs have warned people against handling cash register receipts for long at a time because it is detrimental to health. He said the receipt ink contains BPH which is the latest bogey-man chemical we have to keep out of our systems at all costs because some lab rats somewhere got cancer when they were exposed to high levels of BPH. Furthermore, NEVER use alcohol based hand sanitizer before handling a receipt because the alcohol causes the BPH-laced ink to dissolve and enter a person’s skin at an alarming rate.

Allow me to summarize. Some scientists in some lab somewhere have enough time AND RESOURCES tdetermine HANDLING CASH REGISTER RECEIPTS MAY KILL YOU! We don’t have a cure for cancer. We don’t have flying cars. We’ve abandoned space flight. Instead of any of the traditional noble pursuits of science, we are funding people to test the toxicity of CASH REGISTER RECEIPTS! You know, if it was just this one kooky story on a random radio program, I probably wouldn’t be ready to chuck our civilization onto the garbage heap of time, but deadly chemical laced register receipts are simply the final proof we have gotten too stupid to live.

Mothers enter a state of paralysis over which brand of “all natural, completely organic food” to feed their babies. It is now considered near child abuse to let a kid have half an hour of unstructured play time. You can go to jail if your baby’s car seat doesn’t meet the specifications for ejection from an F-22 Raptor cruising at Mach 2. Parents are calling COLLEGE PROFESSORS to try getting “little Joanie’s” grades changed. Our upcoming generations are so mollycoddled and pampered we will be lucky if the little hot house flowers survive to reproductive age and even if they do, their parents are probably going to have to help them with that too.

Men are no better. The average man has about as much chance of fixing a minor plumbing problem in his house as Bill Cosby does of ever being on television again. Working on a simple electrical circuit is as foreign to them as a Moroccan Kasbah. Car companies have made their cars impossible for any shade tree mechanic or dedicated DIYer to work on, not because it makes a better car but because of lawsuits. If the car is impossible to repair at home, no one is going to do something boneheaded, lose a finger, and SUE THE COMPANY!

If you don’t agree we’ve become too stupid to live, just read the warning labels on products. The last belt I bought for my 2003 Element had a warning on the back in huge bold type saying “DO NOT attempt to change belts with the engine running.” Every bottle of shampoo, stick of deodorant, and can of mousse in our bathroom has a warning stating “For EXTERNAL USE only.” Our iron has a tag on the power cord reminding us “DO NOT iron clothes while wearing them.” For any of these products to sport these labels two things have happened: 1) Some idiot somewhere tried to replace a fan belt with the car running or something similar and 2) said idiot successfully sued the product’s company for a huge sum of money because the company didn’t warn him against being an idiot. I hate to admit it because I am a certifiable gun nut myself, but I’m starting to seriously reconsider my stance on gun control just because we have entirely too many people with guns who have NO IDEA how to use a gun safely, if they can use it at all.

So here we are, hurtling towards oblivion trying to dodge poisonous cash register receipts and deadly water bottles. If anyone were to ask me today what movie I think best predicts our future here, I’d skip all the usual suspects like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Planet of the Apes, or 2012. Instead, I think the movie with our civilization’s name on it is a little watched flick called Idiocracy.

Watch it and shiver.

Love ya’ll, and keep those feet clean.

Dec3

Great War Wednesday: First Battle of Ypres — The Carnage Properly Begins

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https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Belgie_ieper_lakenhal_nacht.jpg

The beautifully rebuilt Cloth Hall in the Ieper city center.

The little Belgian town of Ieper, more famously known as Ypres, is no stranger to bloodletting. The Germanic tribal ancestors of the town fought Roman raids. The stubborn Flemish bled in a massacre by French troops in the fourteenth century Battle of the Golden Spurs. The War of Spanish Succession and the War of the First Coalition both raged outside the city’s walls.

All the bloodshed of the previous centuries paled however when compared with the series of battles fought here during the First World War. The first of these encounters, called aptly enough The First Battle of Ypres, began on 19 October 1914 and lasted over a month until 22 November 1914. The battle is most notable for being the first of the trench battles which came to symbolize the next three and a half years on the Western Front during the Great War.

Up until First Ypres, battles had been fluid. The German invasion through Belgium into France slowed somewhat at Mons and then halted altogether at The Miracle on the Marne early in September 1914. What followed is now called the “Race to the Sea” where each combatant tried desperately to outflank the other in what was quite literally a race northwest to get to the English Channel, turn the opponent’s flank, and secure a victory. Unfortunately, the race was a tie and the result was The First Battle of Ypres.

In many ways, Ypres became the training ground for the rest of the war and both sides paid in hogsheads of blood for the lessons. First, no one brought enough of anything. The Germans famously claimed the men would be home for Christmas and the French and British had similar overly optimistic assessments of the coming conflict. As a result, men ended up at the front without enough supplies. On the German side, captured Russian and Belgian small arms had to be pressed into service while on the Allied side, the artillery batteries were woefully under armed. Before this battle, doctrine of the day figured a few hundred shells would be expended in the course of a battle. By the time Ypres ended, the generals realized a few hundred shells wouldn’t last an hour. By the end of the war, individual guns were allotted a thousand shells EACH.

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The end of the line of trenches on the Western Front. The top barbed wire is German while the lower strands are Allied. The wire literally runs right into the sea.

As with most of the months long “battles” of the First World War, a detailed analysis is far beyond the scope of my little blog. Thousand page books litter libraries across the land devoted only to this one battle. I would like to note two major outcomes of the First Battle of Ypres, however. First, the battle introduced the trench system to the Western Front. After neither side managed to gain the other’s flank, no one could figure out what to do. Situations like this were somewhat unusual and given the flatness of the coastal terrain and the deadliness of the new machine guns and heavy artillery, both the German and the Allies figured nearly simultaneously the best thing to do would be “dig in.”

Now armies had dug in before. Trenches in warfare were nothing new, per se, but what was new was the scale of trenches developed up and down the front during and after this battle. By the beginning of 1915, an unbroken line of trenches and associated fortifications stretched all the way from the beaches of the English Channel roughly southeast to the border of neutral Switzerland. The saddest commentary of the Great War is probably the best known — those trenches would STAY more or less in a static position for three years during which time hundreds of thousands of men would hurl themselves across No Man’s Land under withering fire with the goal of taking the other side’s trenches. Massive carnage and miniscule territorial gains were the inevitable result each time.

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Cloth Hall circa 1918

The second development of the First Battle of Ypres is the area which became known as the Ypres Salient. This area directly around the ancient town was a “bulge” into the German lines. Vicissitudes of war in the early stages of the battle resulted in the Entente forces holding this one bulge several hundred yards into German territory. While that may seem like a good thing — being far out in the enemy’s lands — it was actually horrible. Because of the bulge of the Salient, the mostly British and Commonwealth troops stationed at the Salient came under fire from THREE sides simultaneously instead of just one. This Ypres Salient endured for the length of the war down to the final German “Hundred Days” offensive in 1918 and it ate men as a hungry cow eats grass.

During the six-week long battle, the British forces lost 58,155 men including the last of the professional army that arrived in August, the French lost 86,237 men and Germany suffered losing 134,315 men. The Belgian army — never large — ceased to exist altogether. Those seem like staggering numbers of dead and wounded and truthfully they are, but despite the ferocity of the First Battle of Ypres, the casualties were quite light when considered beside later battles such as the Somme and Verdun when it became de rigueur to have 50,000 men die in a DAY, not a six-week stretch. Still, it was a small taste of things to come.

That’s all for this episode of Great War Wednesday. Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

 

Nov27

Giving Thanks 2014

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https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Freedom_from_Want.jpgToday is Thanksgiving Day here in America and while I want to go on record as being thankful for all the usual suspects like my precious wife, health, etc., I want to spend a little time talking about some of the things I’m thankful for that may seem a little unusual.

For instance, I’m thankful I live in a country where a police officer can do his job — even if that job means shooting and killing a suspect — and not end up going to jail for it. Killing someone is always difficult and he’ll have his own version of prison in his mind for the rest of his life and I can speak with some authority about prisons of the mind.

At the same time, I’m also thankful to live in a country where people who think a police officer SHOULD go to jail for doing his job when that job means shooting and killing a suspect can riot in the streets and burn public and private property while discharging firearms willy-nilly WITHOUT going to jail as well. Rioting, looting, and destruction of property has a long and venerated history in the United States. One of the seminal events in the founding of our nation was the destruction of an entire cargo of valuable tea by masked men called patriots.

Oh, as long as I’m talking about our founding patriots, I’m thankful to live in a country where racism is not only LEGAL, it was ensconced in our sacred Constitution of the United States for over 100 years. Thankfully, I can hate anyone I want to for their race or religion or, to quote the inimitable Oscar Wilde, “for the color of [their] hair” and they in return can hate ME for any or all of the same reasons and it’s just fine with the government.

https://i0.wp.com/images.art.com/images/products/regular/13212000/13212965.jpgAnyone who thinks I’m being facetious about this needs to realize I truly AM thankful to live in a country where the freedom to gather in mass and lose our collective s$%& over something we don’t agree with and not die is protected. For people who think this isn’t a real freedom, I have two words for you: TIANANMEN SQUARE. I’m not naive; our government kills people too, but at least it has the common decency to do so either quietly and privately or wait until they are in some other country.

Speaking of killing in other countries, I’m thankful I live in a country where I can believe in and worship God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Ganesha, Odin, Zeus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and be perfectly safe. People might make fun of me for being a Christian myself, but at least if I’m let’s say Presbyterian, the Southern Baptists won’t take up arms against me and my family, lay siege to my hometown, starve our congregation, and finally break into our Children’s Church and cut the precious babies’ little heads off in front of their parents before beheading the parents as well . . . on video, because — you know — Allahu Akbar!! No, those pesky Baptists might not believe like I do, and they might not speak to me in the liquor store, but at least they won’t kill me for my heretical views of Calvinism.https://i0.wp.com/www.rockwellplates.com/Site/images/SEP%20Collector%20Cards/freedom%20of%20worship.jpg

I’m thankful to live in a country where I get to start spending obscene amounts of money I don’t have to buy things I really don’t need ON SALE just as soon as I finish gorging myself on enough food to feed an entire West African village. Of course it sucks for the people working at the retail stores who have to wait on my L-tryptophan laden carcass when they would much rather be home eating their own village-worth of food with their families and other loved ones, but them’s the breaks. If you don’t want to work from 6 PM to 1 AM at the mall then get back by 5:00 AM (yeah, that’s 4 hours later) to deal with the screaming hordes, then you need to use the tons of opportunities the average wage slave has to rocket up the corporate ladder so you can be a CEO and order people away from their homes and families to work on a great holiday so you can get that awesome seven-figure bonus check! This IS America after all, you know? The LAND OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY!

Oh, on the subject of opportunity, I’m also thankful to live in a country where a man can rape a woman at a party and blame her for it, shoplift a cartload of seafood, and screech profanities from atop a table in a crowded public place WITHOUT ANY CONSEQUENCE as long as he can throw a football for a top program. Of course, he may have as his idol some politician. After all, politicians can let their dates drown in a wrecked car in cold water and go on to become “American Icons” as long as they are from the right family.https://i0.wp.com/images.art.com/images/products/regular/13212000/13212659.jpg

Finally, I’m thankful to live in a great country where half the population has the RIGHT, nay the DUTY, to be royally pissed off at the OTHER half of the population almost constantly. In other countries, they’d call these camps “insurgencies” or “rebel factions” but here they’re just the members of whatever political party is out of power at the moment. Instead of blowing up bases or marching with torches and pitchforks in the streets, we just wage wars of words every two years in November and have REALLY big fights every four years just to get the opportunity to elect people who are going to do the EXACT SAME THING as the people already holding those positions . . . they’ll just call them by another name. Maybe.

So that’s it for this year’s thankfulness. Now it’s time to get ready for my feast and the following three games of American football where I can watch guys run up and down the field for millions of dollars playing a child’s game while sitting between my two favorite people who happen to be teachers and barely make a living wage to educate our next generation. Later on, we’re going SHOPPING to line the coffers of the CEOs. After all, we all have to do our parts or they won’t get that new yacht they’ve had their eye on this year!

Love y’all, Happy Thanksgiving, and Keep those feet clean.