We decided to take a break from watching the interminable (and at this point, rather depressing) Midsomer Murders. From a starkly realistic point of view, the mythical English Midsomer must be about as dangerous as Cabot Cove, with regular citizens regularly dropping off their various perches, to the tune of lashings of blackmail, family grudges, illicit relationships, financial fraud, and outright criminality among the lush gardens and even lusher cozy cottages. It got to the point where we were playing “spot the actor” or “what had we seen this guest star in before?” Anyway, we needed a break, and the choice fell on the latest TV series adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee mystery novels, Dark Winds … which turns out to be surprisingly good, although some elements from the books have been combined, and the lead characters various backgrounds tweaked a little.
Personal Narrative
Slow But Exceedingly Fine
I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.
Dollars and Eyeballs
While everyone else on the conservative side of the blogosphere today is marveling over the concurrent train wreck of the Biden-Trump “debate” last night, and the “deer in the headlights” reaction from the Establishment Media over their horrible realization that they can’t possibly pull any kind of media veil over the wreckage – I just thought that I might wander off on another tangent. I’ll meditate and marvel a little on there on how a national retail corporation pulled decisively back from the brink of a Bud Light-like, company-wrecking disaster. I speak of the Tractor Supply turn-around. I should like to have been eavesdropping in the C-level suite of Tractor Supply’s headquarters, when everyone concerned there realized that going all out for progressive causes like DEI/DIE, the Pride Mafia and open borders was about as popular with their rural and suburban fly-over country market demographic as a case of genital warts. I would assume that the meeting where they realized “Oh-krep-on-a-biscuit-we-gotta put a stop to it now before we lose our phony-baloney jobs!” was pretty epic.
On Rustication
Forty-five years ago today, I was “rusticated”—which is to say departed the University for a metropolitan area eight hours’ drive to the southwest, at that time less than one-fifth the population of Chicagoland and only one-eighth its density, which would certainly seem like being sent to the countryside to anyone who grew up within a forty-mile radius of the Loop. Recent events have conspired to cast my mind back to that event and reflect on its meaning.
Warning: autobiographical details ahead; and while acknowledging a certain Conradian truth quoted just below the jump, I must insist that those details are the least important. If there is anything worth pondering here, it is the lessons for our time, and the finding of a way to avoid utter catastrophe, which must include avoiding idealizing our past. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I went to the University of Chicago, and I put away childish things.
California Dreaming
My daughter and I and Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson had to make a flying visit out to California all last week. Family reasons my mother asked to see the three of us. She is in her nineties, bedridden and failing; this was the first time that she had asked to see us. We knew it would be the last, so we dropped everything, packed Thing the Versa and hit the road on Memorial Day for the twenty-hour-long drive, rather dreading everything that we might encounter when we got there. Not just the personal but dreading encounters with the progressively-inclined and everything else which has come about in the nearly half-century since I upped sticks and left California behind for the military and then retirement in Texas.