Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.
Personal Narrative
A Memory – Christmas in the Barracks, 1978
( 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…
Reaching for the Alien Shore
So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.
NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:
- this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
- lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
- not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.
The Time of the Season
Yes, the time of the season has arrived again, although seeing all the pumpkin spice scented and flavored seasonal stuff on the shelves of various retail outlets should have provided what is popularly known as “a clue.” (Along with all the autumn leaf and scarecrow and harvest décor things…)
Yes, Thanksgiving, followed closely by Christmas, featuring a centerpiece dish of what I used to call Eternal Turkey, Strong to Save. Thanksgiving when I was living at a home with my parents and sibs, meant a ginormous turkey on both holidays, followed by my mother’s schedule of dishes incorporating the leftovers thereof: plain old warmed up leftovers initially, followed by hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey a la king, turkey croquettes, turkey and noodle casserole … and when the carcass was stripped to bones, into the pot for broth and another two weeks of turkey stew/soup.
A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect
You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.