Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

Considering Media Teflon

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You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees“

Oh, pity the poor establishment media folks, the woke clergy, and the professional bleeding-heart progressive activists, all making woeful faces and lamenting regarding the round-up and repatriation of masses of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s as if they all honestly believe that the masses of illegals are all doe-eyed innocent widdle cheeeldren and humble suffering agricultural workers, all packed off by their cheating employers once the harvest season is finished. The bubble in which these sentiments are enshrined as gospel is being severely battered over this last week as it becomes apparent that many, many Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and incomes welcome the ICE roundups and deportations with cheers of rapturous approval. Imagine that.

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Rare and Fine Books

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(A break today from matters political.)

Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.

A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.

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The Fire Next Time

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And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild Mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.

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At Long Last…

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… and probably too late for the largest portion of the British ruling cadre (such as it is, and to include their national establishment media, political and intellectual class) to emerge with any honor and credit – now that the industrial-scope sexual trafficking and abuse of mostly white lower-class British girls at the hands of Moslem and Pakistani men has blown up into an international concern. Abuse which was enabled and hastily buried away from attention because .. well, musn’t hurt the delicate feewings of a favored minority class by pointing out rampant lawlessness on their part. One mussent point anything so infra dig, don’tcha know, because they are an essential and obedient voting bloc for the Ruling Cadre … and the segment of the population that they prey upon are so … (shudder) deplorable. I mean, one just doesn’t! It would be so raaacist…

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A Memory – Christmas in the Barracks, 1978

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( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

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