0707: What’s the cost of complete transparency?

0728: Just a word.

OK, so we assassinated a person never tried in a court of law for crimes he was never found guilty of because an administration that repeatedly lied to us told us he was to blame.

Is this what American Justice has descended to?

USA! USA! USA! USA…!

From 1730 today until 1830 tomorrow, I will be off-line. There will be no new posts during this time, nor will I be checking email. Go for a walk. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book.. Appreciate all that is your family.

0746: The case for pacifism

My all-time favorite Oops! appears below the fold. Continue Reading »

One of the radio programs I like to listen to is Stuart McLean’s The Vinyl Café, broadcast in Cleveland at 3 p.m. Sundays on WCPN, 90.3 FM. Think of it as a Prairie Home Companion with much better music and stories.

Each week he reads a story from listeners. The segment inspired me to write, and submit, the following.

In the Navy I learned a lesson about Minnesotans, peppermint schnapps and Schlitz beer.

In the late ‘70s I served as a second-class Gunner’s Mate responsible for the after missile house and the men who worked there aboard the Billy B, officially known as the U.S.S. Bainbridge. One of those young men was from New Jersey. His name was John Scamper. Scamper’s father died and he went home to bury him. He came back with a wife. The day after his return, he got a surprise at mail call, a check from his New Jersey bank for more than a hundred dollars. Scamper told us that he had cashed out the savings account while he was home, but the bank had duplicated the transaction. He knew that the check was an error and any responsible person with a new wife would have set it aside and called the bank to clear up the matter. Scamper wasn’t a responsible person, however, he was a sailor. It was Wednesday. Scamper declared that after knock-off we would party. Who were we to argue?

The petty officer of the watch rang two bells on the first dogwatch – 5 p.m. for landlubbers – and I locked up the missile house. I walked forward to my berthing space. My rack was the middle of a stack of three grouped with three other identical stacks separated by a three-foot aisle. Vertically we each had about two feet between our mattress and the bunk above us. Getting changed into our civvies in that tight space involved choreographed maneuvers, but ones we were all well practiced in. Within 20 minutes we had crossed the brow and were headed for the West Gate. Scamper cashed the magical check at the Navy Exchange and we stopped at the package store to spend it. Soon, like Snow White’s dwarfs, we were marching toward Scamper’s newly rented bungalow in Bremerton, Washington, with our alcoholic burdens hoisted on our shoulders.

The Scamper marital manse had four furnished rooms: living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath, perhaps 400 or 500 square feet in all. He led the way into the living room where we found his bride Cheryl standing behind a tiny table set for two with flatware, plates and wine glasses across a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. Two candles burned in the center of the table and the aroma of Bolognese sauce came from the pot on the stove. “You’ll never guess what happened, sweetheart,” Scamper said. Cheryl was a deer in the headlights. He made room in the refrigerator for the cases of beer and we huddled liquor bottles on the table. Scamper blew out the candles.

Over the next five hours or so we listened to cassette tapes, told lies and drank steadily. Sometime between ten and eleven we ran nearly dry. Unwilling to call it a night, I took up a collection and, here is where the Minnesotans come in, handed the wad of cash to Charlie Clasen and Roger Sundby with instructions to go buy as much alcohol as possible. They left and the rest of us nursed our final beers. As our last swigs disappeared, Clasen and Sundby returned with fifths of peppermint schnapps and cases of Schlitz beer. None of us were familiar with the Scandinavian custom but we drank shots of the first and chased them with cans of the second to appropriate Swedish (or maybe Norwegian, I can’t recall) toasts. I do remember thinking how minty-fresh my mouth felt.

Around midnight, the last can crushed and tossed into the recycling bag – we were even then an environmentally conscious crew – we said our goodnights, thanked Cheryl profusely for her hospitality and strolled back the ship. Walking along under the clear night sky, I marveled at my steady gait. Back in the berthing compartment, I stripped to my skivvies, rolled into my rack and fell quickly asleep.

At four bells on the morning watch (6 a.m.) I awakened to the traditional “Reveille, reveille. All hands heave out and trice up. Now reveille. “ I turned to roll out of my rack and froze. There, three inches from my eyes, on the corner of my pillow case, no bigger than a quarter, was a small, perfectly round, gob of vomit. Never in my life had I been sick from drinking; only once had I even had a hangover (bad Tequila). Before anyone else could see what I’d done, I sprang out, grabbed my towel, shaving kit and the damning pillowcase and hurried unseen into the head. I showered, shaved and returned to my bunk – stuffing the rinsed pillowcase into the laundry on my way – to dress. My bunkmates were all still asleep. I went up to breakfast. I felt fine. I felt hungry. I had dodged a bullet.

When I returned, ready to admonish the non-hackers for sleeping in, I was stopped by Sammy, “Doodle” Dolen. Doodle slept on the bottom rack immediately across and down from mine.

“Hess, do you remember what you did last night?”

“Uh, sure. We had a party at Scamper’s.”

“No, I mean after we got back.”

“Uh, I went to sleep.”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?” I asked with uncertain dread.

Everyone around us in the tight space leaned in. Doodle told me how during the midwatch he had awakened to what he thought were gagging noises. He had turned on his bunk light and rolled over just in time to see me lean out and open the floodgates. The spew was prodigious. I filled his boots and sprayed him, his bunk and the two bunks above him.

“We woke up the whole berthing compartment yelling,” he said. “Baldwin” (Sherwood Baldwin, my division’s first class petty officer, slept in the bunk above Doodle) “used cuss words I’ve never heard before. We dragged you out but you wouldn’t wake up. We carried you into the showers and turned the cold water on you. You didn’t move. I wanted to get a corpsman,” he said, “but Baldwin said you were breathing fine. We cleaned up the mess, changed you and all the sheets and rolled you back into your bunk. You owe me a new pair of boondockers.”

I stood silent for several beats. “Sorry,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t have sent Clasen and Sundby.”

Like all Sea Stories (see Basic Rules), and per McLean’s requirement that the story be mostly true, the above contains embellishments, twists and fuzzy memory. Errors, inconsistencies and fabrications are all my own.

…but with violet eyes to die for.

From 1730 today until 1830 tomorrow, I will be off-line. There will be no new posts during this time, nor will I be checking email. Go for a walk. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book.. Appreciate all that is your family.

I am a tale weaver and all my literature is spiritual. I read and write to inform my emotional understandings of my perceived reality and, if I am mindful, to glimpse how others perceive their own. That I should desire my perceptions be Reality – that which does not go away when ignored – is natural because I crave justification and acceptance for my own prejudices. Short of that goal, I need others to concur in my assessment and reinforce my rhapsody.

As a reader I proselytize to draw others to my particular literature and create a buffer between myself and those with other prejudices and perceptions; the larger the community I create the greater my individual surety. As a writer I attempt to elevate the process by engaging in the conversation and submitting my perceptions for acceptance, rejection or, horribly, indifference. Sometimes I succeed. I explore the holes in my being by burdening my fictional characters with those voids and experimenting with their interactions. People who have not yet written express surprise when I tell them how, when the work is good, my characters take on lives of their own and refuse to go where I, in my phancy, intend. This is discovery. Christopher Columbus thought he sailed to Cathay. What he found eclipsed the banal goal of his backers and changed his World.

In writing, I detonate explosives of words that briefly dash away my shadows. When I place my charges well, I blow back the dark and flood the lacuna with natural light that reveals further perdition. If I enter my hidden places honestly, then I elevate my words to Literature.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Did you see the pretty “picture” on the front page of the Plain Dealer this morning? In color. Were you excited? Please take a deep breath.

It’s a rendering of Fantasy No. 7,654 of wished-for development on the Lake Erie lakefront, this one supposedly by the Cleveland Browns, the biggest welfare client the city now subsidizes.

The PD does public relations for our chief cheaters.

When my family and I were coming to Cleveland in 1965 Continue Reading »

“I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” Wimpy promised. My financially challenged Bainbridge shipmates rephrased the cartoon bargain as, “I’ll give you $25 on payday for $20 today,” and similar offers are a trope for economically marginalized Americans queuing before the bulletproof glass at loan-shark-cum-payday-loan operations where a pound of flesh passes for reasonable terms. We have so perverted our sense of natural order that we think borrowing from the future to pay for the present is how the World should work.

When some of us find solace in alcohol or drugs from the despair of our present and the phantasm that our future will never arrive, we call ourselves addicts. When we borrow capital for the same reasons, we call ourselves consumers, yet we are just as addicted and, with reason, we ought to label bankers – all who profit from the buying and selling of money – pushers.

As a Zen-Jewish Atheist, I allow that comingled with the mounds of malarkey found in all wisdom literature, there exist crumbs of sense like the rebuke against usury: the loaning of capital for interest. In pre-capitalist civilizations, this constraint stands askew from myriads of gawdly instructions. In our Capitalist society, the circumscription is heresy and nearly unenforceable.

We can, however, enjoin usury to our favor via a financial sin tax on Wall Street. Transaction fees daily generate billions benefitting our oligarchy. We the People must tap this coffer for damages done to us all in the name of growth and turn the wealth to casting off forever the chains of our national mortgage.

Then we all can pay as we go.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I hope you read Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver’s insightful look here as he traced the decline of Cleveland. It is an important historical document of the city’s deterioration. It revealed the nature of the loss of population. The 2010 U.S. Census puts the figure at 396,815. Far from the high of near one million mark.

That’s about half the population of the city when I arrived here in 1965 to work at the Plain Dealer. The newspaper then was called the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It dropped “Cleveland” from its name many years ago.

When I arrived in April of 1968 the city’s population was about 750,000. The 1970 U.S. Census established that figure. It had been 876,000 in 1960.

Our decline, already in progress, since has been precipitous and severe. And damaging. And painful.

I believe the period I observed had a dramatic and lasting impact on what happened to Cleveland in the past 45 years. It has been a period pockmarked with selfish schemes that put profit ahead of community betterment.

What were some of the causes?

There were the causes that most cities encounter of urban sprawl, the construction of highways through city neighborhoods and the desire for newer housing and, of course, better schools. All aided urban flight.

In Cleveland, however, I think other civic decisions Continue Reading »

We the not-wealthy-white-landowners, in order to perfect Our union must wrest control of these United States from Corporate America, a legal fiction with allegiance to no nation. We must begin with a 28th amendment to Our Constitution that defines, with precise clarity and brevity, We The People solely as individual citizens. For Our first forty years, elites from Massachusetts and Virginia led Our nation. As a deeply flawed war hero from Tennessee reached the White House in 1829 ordinary citizens seized Our first fragments of economic and political power from the White male landowners and began to broaden the power base in the United States. Across the next 140 years we gathered ever greater shares of the franchise with the 15th, 17th, 19th and 26th amendments of Our Constitution and further diluted the power of the Oligarchy.

Today that march is stalled. Corporate America won legal status as one of The People with the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Board of Elections. I do not fault the justices of the court, but rather Our failure to defend Our Constitution. We have been taught that Our government balances on three equal branches – the legislative, the executive and the judicial – but they rest on Our foundational fourth branch codified in: We the People. That corporations with, by design, no morality, no sense of justice and no obligation save profit are made part of that foundation imperils Our less than perfect union and risks tyranny.

The People, united to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty, must rescue Our Constitution.