I see from a couple of different websites that there was another episode of the ‘knock out’ game in the last few days; this one involved a white disabled military vet on public transportation in the city of Cleveland, attacked and beaten in public by a group of black teenagers. There have been so many of these incidents reported in the last two years or so usually appearing briefly on the surface of the mainstream news metro section like a bubble, popping and vanishing. Very often the color of the perpetrators is not even noted in the ‘official’ statements, but so cynical are we consumers of news becoming that we know that this means the perpetrators are of color, just as we know that when the political party of a miscreant in the news is not mentioned, (or mentioned very far down in the story) that the miscreant is a Democrat. These stories are, in the parlance those who track pop music hits, bubbling under. Not in the top forty or in a manner of speaking at the top of national news.
Sgt. Mom
Under Water
A large part of the British Isles is – apparently under water – just as a large part of the US is snowed in. The up side of too much rain is that you don’t have to shovel the rain our of your driveway so that you can get to work. The bad side of too much rain is that you can’t shovel it out of your driveway…
Anyway, I ran across this article in the Spectator (which I used to read on-line a lot before they re-did their site and put the best stuff behind a pay-wall…) about the massive flooding in one particular area. Blame it on the EU, apparently. And super-greenie environmentalists.
Her Inevitableness
This is what I used to call her, in blog posts at ncobrief.com during the run-up to the 2008 primaries; Hillary Clinton; who seemed so … inevitable. She would be there, a power to behold and take seriously in the presidential primaries. “In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”
Well, I am certain that some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters have loved and despaired, in the resulting contest between ebony and ovary in the 2008 primaries. Eh I didn’t care at the time, still don’t care and can’t be made to care. I will note for the record that my daughter was taking college classes then, and both of us were annoyed beyond all reason by the assumption that because we were both women, and politically involved, that we were OF COURSE all about Hillary. Our support was taken as a matter of fact. THE FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT! This possibility was apparently intended to make us both go wobbly in the knees and vote with our vaginas instead of our brains.
History Friday – Becoming the Other, Part 2
Part one is here – a meditation on how suddenly a group of citizens became the ‘other’ during the Civil War.
In the wake of a military crackdown on a region perceived to be in rebellion philosophically and perhaps politically against the State of Texas and the Confederacy, a series of military trials of an assortment of civilians and local militia volunteers was held in San Antonio in the late summer and early autumn of 1862. Storekeeper Julius Schlickum was the first convicted, although no one testifying at his trial could say anything worse of him than his enthusiasm for the Confederacy was markedly restrained. The second prisoner convicted in the commission hearings had considerably more meat and justification to the charges laid against him; Philip Braubach, formerly elected sheriff of Gillespie County. Braubach was an outspoken Unionist, an associate of Jacob Keuchler another Unionist, a farmer and surveyor who had trained as a forester in Germany.
To Become the ‘Other’
I suppose that my thoughts were running this week on the theory and practice of ‘otherizing’ because my work in the Tiny Bidness has brought me full-face with a prime example of how upright good citizens, patriotic as they saw it, were brought by a turn of the political wheel into being accused criminals, brought before a military commission and charged with crimes which if found guilty of by the tribunal could have drawn a capital sentence. That the several found guilty of disloyalty to the régime and sentenced to death, imprisonment, exile or a heavy fine did in most cases, escape the worst of it and return to lives of post-war prosperity and respect must have been of cold comfort at the time.