My daughter and I spent almost all of last Saturday at our booth in the parking lot of a local Beall’s, in the heart of what would pass as the new downtown of Bulverde, Texas if Bulverde could be said to have a downtown of any sort. There is a sort of Old Downtown Bulverde, at the crossroads of Bulverde Hills Drive and Bulverde Road, where the post office is (in a teeny Victorian cottage covered with white-painted gingerbread trim) and around the corner from one of the original settler’s farmsteads, complete with an original stone house and barn now repurposed into an event venue. There is a small airfield nearby, and astonishingly enough, Googlemaps show a polo ground. But the landscape all around is that of the lowland Hill Country low rolling, patched scrubby cedar, and occasional stands of live oaks. Everything – including a perfectly astounding number of single family housing developments are scattered unobtrusively here and there among the hills, the cedar and the oaks.
Sgt. Mom
Home Grown Jihad
I think that I shall never hear a phrase more heavily loaded with skeptical sarcasm than the bromide of “Islam is a religion of peace.” It’s even more heavily loaded than the Soviet-era convention of client states calling themselves the “People’s Democratic Republic of Whatever.” I also will never see anything rhetorically speedier than those self-elected community Islamic community leaders who briefly note some horrific and murderous act committed by a member alleged to be in good standing in their community and then commence to whine about how they will be hurt (Hurt, I say, deeply hurt!) by the resulting (nearly always non-existent) anti-Islamic backlash on the part of the general public. Strong word whining, but no other expression quite hits the spot when it comes to self-centered self-involvement. The implication which comes across is that blowing off the legs of runners at the Boston Marathon, knocking down the Twin Towers, opening fire on a bunch of Army troops at a post processing center, or beheading a middle-aged female office worker while screaming Allah Akbar is more wrong because it makes Muslims look bad, not because it is mutilation and murder, mass or otherwise.
History Friday – The Last of Her Ilk
I was going to write about another mildly notorious woman an imperishably ladylike and competent professional gambler who was a figure of note in her day on the Texas frontier for History Friday, but I noted the departure of Deborah, known to her family as Debo, the last of the notorious Mitfords, from this mortal plane. Yeah, it was in the Daily Mail website, but they had a number of lovely archive pictures of her, taken throughout her life which through no particular fault of her own was spiced with notoriety. Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire which sounds like a made-up title for one of those horrible regency romances was privileged and burdened, I think in about the same degree.
Tommy in Service – Conclusion
(Wherein I meditate upon the relationship between military members and veterans, and the commander-in-chief – present and most recent last.)
I was not a voter especially enamored of establishing a ruling class, so I was not all that enthused about Bush 2. In the 2000 elections I was considerably annoyed that it was an unedifying choice between the scions of two long-established political families. I thought it was not a good omen, redolent of hereditary politics and an established aristocracy and that there was not that much to choose between them. At this point Al Gore had not displayed anything of his hypocritical and self-serving fixation on so-called ‘global warming’ and I basically flipped a coin. But as it turned out, post 9-11, my daughter’s commander in chief was Bush 2, and as it also turned out, his respect and consideration for the troops in wartime was a rock of constancy. To quote the line from the TV series Sharpe’s Rifles, “There are two kinds of officers, sir: killin’ officers and murderin’ officers. Killin’ officers are poor old buggers that get you killed by mistake. Murderin’ officers are mad, bad, old buggers that get you killed on purpose – for a country, for a religion, maybe even for a flag.”
Tommy in Service
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees! R. Kipling
I started my first stretch in the military as Jimmy Carter was elected and sworn into office. I did not think anything of him, particularly either pro or con, although being a bit of a snob, I did think it was distinctly juvenile of him to be known as Jimmy, rather than James. Boys are called by the diminutive; men ought to go by their proper names. The one big issue that I did hold against him for most of my first hitch in the military was when he declined a military spending bill which would have provided for the rebuilding of the Misawa AB high school, which at the time of my assignment there was housed in three pre-WWII buildings which had once been Imperial Japanese Army stables. On hot days, those buildings still smelt faintly of horse, and the students had to use the base gym for their PE classes. I recollect that there was grumbling resentment among the senior NCO cohort (and likely among the officers , too) whose teenaged dependents attended the school, to the effect that that Amy Carter did not attend classes in 70+ old shacks that smelled of ancient horse-shit. The Iran hostage situation and his limp-wristed response to it didn’t develop until later. And Carter that bundle of mind-numbing sanctimony and anti-Semitism was gone by the time I was done with that first tour, having pretty much disappointed everyone who assumed that having been a wartime Naval Academy graduate and serving USN officer would have been good for something when it came to being a commander in chief.