Category Archives: American History

July 22, 2016 · 2:41 pm

Forgotten war heroes

Note: The floral background is my coffee table runner, which I sewed from Wal-mart clearance fabric.

The information age makes so many tasks easier and accessible to ordinary people. My husband went and bought our first personal computer in 1997 after months of me arguing, “Who needs a computer in their home?” He kept telling me it would be great for the kids and that brought forth my argument about how much money we already wasted on our two sons and their endless need for a newer gaming system. Our two daughters never took much of an interest in computer gaming.

After we had a PC, the kids began to complain to my husband that I was hogging the computer and my husband would smirk and remind me of all my arguments against purchasing a PC. I was completely wrong and this same argument goes to the cellphone craze. I rarely used my cellphone, and had my husband take internet off our phones years ago. We still have a landline at home and I don’t travel much. I didn’t need a cellphone at my job. Assuredly, I didn’t need a smart phone. Last year, my husband told me he wanted to get an Android phone and he said I should get one too. Here again, I didn’t see the point, so my son, who is a software engineer, told me I was thinking about a cellphone in the wrong way. He told me I needed to stop thinking of it as a “phone” and start thinking of it as a portable computer.

Being technologically challenged, my forays into the computer world always start with baby steps, then I’ll have some epiphany leading me towards my son’s much clearer vision of technology, both the marvelous good and the ominous, potential bad.

Robotics are being used to improve the lives of many people with physical disabilities, in industry and many other positive ways. Yet, after the Dallas police shooting, I hadn’t given a second thought to the robot armed with C-4 the Dallas police used to take down the shooter, but my son pointed out some nightmarish scenarios combining militarized police and robotics, that gave me pause to reflect. My thought was that I was just glad the police had neutralized the shooter without any more police officers being injured. Such is technology, it can be put to good or evil and as I’ve mentioned before about what a “threat” is:

“Here’s another one of those home truths that I am so fond of using to make my point. Let’s state what should be obvious, but apparently needs to be driven home once more – any weapon, be it a slingshot or a nuclear weapon, is an inanimate object. Inanimate objects aren’t the problem. Yep, it’s always the people that pose the problem and let’s be more precise here, it’s what’s in the hearts of man that can turn that slingshot or nuclear weapon into a “threat”. We’ve always got to contend with people first and the rest of the inanimate objects truly rank as a secondary issue.”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2013/06/18/global-zero-another-nothing-burger-plan/

While my son brought up nightmare scenarios, in my life, I’ve been trying to incorporate computer technology into my life in positive, helpful ways, with my crafting, cooking, writing and definitely with my love of books. A couple posts back I mentioned printing out a vintage print for a craft project, which I found at a free site. There’re plenty of free sites for many things, from coupons to full novels no longer under copyright. I keep trying to find more ways to incorporate computer technology into my daily tasks, from finding recipes to paying bills to historical research, to my blogging.

Around the Army, it’s like a true melting pot of America and I learned so much from all the people we met along our travels as an Army family. Many years ago, my husband, kids and I had gone to Augusta to visit a Desert Storm friend of my husband and his wife, whom had also been our neighbors in Germany during Desert Storm.

Often, enlisted soldiers come from poor backgrounds, like my husband and I did. However, around the Army I noticed that among enlisted leaders, who move up the ranks, there are a lot of very smart, hard-working people, who read a lot. This friend and his wife loved to read as much as my husband and I do.

During this visit, my husband’s friend, who has rural GA roots, and I began talking about several things as I was looking at some of the books in his home. I love browsing through people’s home libraries or even their periodicals, as it tells me a lot about them. In fact, when my kids were young, I told them if they go in a friend’s house and there are no books, find other friends.

Above: My grandmother’s two books on herbal medicine

This friend had several books on old folk medicine and home remedies in the South and also on oral histories. Both topics have been of interest to me since my early teens. When my maternal grandmother died when I was 11, my mother, inherited some of my grandmother’s books and a unique revolving wooden bookcase, that was about 40 inches high. I became fascinated by two books on herbal remedies, while my mother, a registered nurse and dedicated believer in modern medicine, refused to consider herbal remedies.

My maternal grandmother preferred natural remedies over chemical ones. The early PA Dutch used a faith healing called Pow wow medicine combined with herbal remedies. My grandmother embraced Pow wow medicine and both herbal and modern medicine, so I guess she wanted to cover all the bases. My mother didn’t want to hear about Pow wow medicine or herbal remedies. My paternal great-grandmother, like my maternal grandmother, embraced all three. As a child, my great-grandmother sent me off to wander the fields and woods to gather items for her. Among her home remedies, she made a salve from the knots on pine trees, so I would go cut off knots on pine trees for her and she made a tea from some weed, the name escapes me at the moment, that was good for whatever ails you. My mother constantly warned me not to drink any of her teas, as I had bad allergies. I sipped my great-grandmother’s teas and survived… That salve she made was actually a good drawing salve for cuts.

On the history channel, when it still was a “history” channel, I watched a show on ancient Egypt and there was a segment on ancient medicine, where the narrator mentioned honey being good to aid in fighting infection and healing cuts. I’ve tried it many times and it works. The ancient Chinese also used honey. I met a young Army wife from south Texas, who babysat my kids when we lived in Germany, who told me to wet a wad of tobacco and stick it on a bee sting to draw out the venom. It worked, so I use it. My late mother would be appalled, but there you have it. She lamented my pack rat tendencies constantly and despaired, when she would ask me why I was keeping all this “junk” and I would respond, “I might need it one day.” And in exasperation she would say, “You are just like your grandmother!” So, I am like my grandmother in many ways….

My grandmothers were just ordinary, poor women in the backwoods of PA, but they worked hard, they were great cooks and bakers, did lovely needlework and quilts, and although “uneducated” they both valued learning. My great-grandmother had a third grade education, married when she was 13 or 14 years old, raised 9 children, ran a farm, she was an expert gardener with shelves midway up her kitchen windows filled with African violets. She taught me how to propagate African violets from leaf cuttings and other plants from cuttings. She taught me how to spot plant insects, diseases and signs of over or under watering. She told me it’s always better to under water than to over water and from my experience that is the truth. She spent her life being productive until she was almost 90 years old. She was in her 70s when I was born and she taught me needlework and I helped her with selecting the fabrics, from boxes of fabric scraps she had acquired from a local blouse factory, and then cutting out her quilt pieces for her. She also patiently helped me learn how to write my letters, while we sat at her kitchen table. She taught me how to read crochet patterns, but despite her best efforts I never caught on to crocheting. She read the newspaper every day.

Above: Government leaflets on where to write for records

One summer, I had been up in her attic looking through boxes and came across post cards and old photos, so I carted them downstairs. My great-grandmother, with the third grade education, had somewhere picked up the habit of having tea with cookies or pastry in the afternoon, so we sat at her kitchen table many afternoons, as I would show her old photos and write the names on the back, as she struggled to remember who the relatives in the photos were. This led to my interest in genealogy. So, I did some research and found addresses to write for information on birth and death records, marriage records, and divorce records.

Herein comes this conversation with my husband’s friend about oral histories, where the information age can greatly aid in not only genealogical research, but in compiling and saving oral histories. Several years ago, an elderly customer in the store where I worked asked me for assistance and we had an amazing conversation, after I commented on the WWII baseball cap he was wearing. He was a local farmer wearing overalls, from out in the boonies in rural GA. As he started to tell me of his WWII experiences, it struck me that his was a tale of a soldier from my favorite WWII movie, The Big Red One, which I wrote about in a long ago blog post:

“Being sort of squeamish and abhorring violence, I’m not a fan of war movies, but one of my favorite movies, oddly enough, is The Big Red One, the 1980 Sam Fuller WWII epic. Being a lowly private in the Army, stationed in southern Germany in 1980, our movie theater was located across a parking lot, behind my barracks. My kaserne, perched atop a picturesque southern mountaintop, was a vintage German army post and the Germans built their posts in a consistent, orderly fashion, with the companies neatly arranged around a parade field in the center and all the lesser support facilities beyond that tight circle.

There wasn’t much to do on small kasernes, like the one I was at, but being a little country girl, I found everything new and interesting. I could imagine I was Heidi in the Alps (well, okay, the Swabian Alps), following the footpath down the mountain to the town proper or let my imagination run wild, gazing out the large window at the end of the female hallway, where a view to rival the famous Neuschwanstein Castle, greeted me each morning. My view, a lovely old monastery perched upon another mountaintop in the distance, fueled my ever-fluttering flights of fancy. Of course, I took several trips to that old monastery to explore it close-up.

Now, having a movie theater within walking distance seemed a luxury to me, because the nearest movie theater, where I grew-up in the mountains of PA, was 10 miles away. I would always ask a few of the guys to go to the movies with me and first we’d go to the snack bar, next to the movie theater, for ice cream, because I loved eating my vanilla ice cream first. These uncomplaining young men, in gentlemanly fashion, usually insisted on buying my ice cream too.

I met many wonderful young men in that unit and as an aside to this tale, gentlemen were still in plentiful supply in the US Army in those days. Back to my story, the only drawback to our movie theater was the same movie played for weeks on end, until something new arrived from the States. I watched The Big Red One over and over and each time I came away remembering some new details I had missed before.”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2014/03/24/who-will-defend-our-castle/

This old farmer is one of America’s heroes, who will likely never be remembered for his sacrifices to our great country. If you’ve got old war veterans in your family or neighborhood, just taking a few minutes to record their stories and preserving them in an online journal or creating a blog to share with other family members could preserve more of the real history of our American heroes.

My interest in these old family photos gave me a deeper appreciation of my uneducated, backwoods ancestors. A few times while having tea in my great-grandmother’s kitchen, one of her sons, my Great-Uncle Clark, stopped by and he took an interest in what I was doing. He served in the South Pacific as a Marine in WWII and was seriously injured.

Years later, when my husband and I were visiting my parents in rural PA, my mother told me, “You should go visit Uncle Clark while you’re home. He asks about you all the time.” So, I drove over to his modest home. His wife is a typical PA Dutch homemaker. The house was charmingly decorated and very clean. My Uncle Clark had pursued the genealogy search with a vengeance and he wanted to discuss his findings with me. He had several boxes in the basement he wanted to retrieve, so I trailed along to the basement, where everything was arranged in an orderly fashion and there were shelves lined with home-canned vegetables and fruits.

We carted the boxes up to his kitchen and chatted for several hours. My Uncle Clark passed away several years ago and his genealogy collection, I believe, is with one of his daughters. Someday I’d like to visit her and see if I can take photos of some of his collection and create an online journal, but the one thing I never talked about, nor did my Uncle Clark ever talk about, was his wartime experiences in WWII. I wish I had gotten his war story and not just “old” family history.

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Filed under American Character, American History, General Interest

July 14, 2016 · 3:30 pm

Civic virtue in America

Above is a half-hour lecture on Civic virtue in Early America, by Dr. Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair, American History, Fordham University. Dr. Cornell explains the vital role of Civic virtue in the thinking of our Founding Fathers and also in Early American society.

At minute 26:56 Dr. Cornell discusses how after the American Revolution women in America started including elements of American civic values into their needlework samplers, which strikes a chord with me. As an avid needlewoman, I’ve done a great deal of reading about needlework and samplers are my favorite needlework design, actually. A sampler was a personal stitch guide that young girls sewed, as they mastered new stitches. They would use it later as a guide to help them remember the various stitches, which was extremely useful in an era before printed references and literacy were widespread.

Even among educated women, a sampler provided a very useful reference, where you could look at the actual stitch on fabric and see how a stitch was worked. Although samplers served a utilitarian purpose, as with needlewomen for millennia, women add their own personal flourishes and artistic elements to turn the prosaic into something pretty. It is most definitely a “female thing”.

I posted this photo of one of my samplers a while back. Sorry the lighting was bad, but here is one of my samplers with American motifs awaiting pressing and framing. This one was a pattern designed by a modern-day needlework designer:

In previous posts I’ve mentioned Rose Wilder Lane, who besides being a famous early 20th century journalist, novelist and political theorist, was an accomplished needlewoman.

In 1961, Woman’s Day magazine invited Rose Wilder Lane to write the story and history of the development of the needlework arts in America. Just as the spirit of individual liberty invigorated American political and commercial life, it invigorated American women and their needlework. Lane writes:

“The first thing that American needlework tells you is that Americans live in the only classless society. This republic is the only country that has no peasant needlework. Everywhere else, peasant women work their crude, naive, gay patterns, suited to their humble class and frugal lives, while ladies work their rich and formal designs proper to higher birth and breeding.

American needlework is not peasant’s work or aristocrat’s. It is not crude and it is not formal. It is needlework expressing a new and unique spirit, more American than American sculpture, painting, literature or classical music.”

p.10, Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework, , by Rose Wilder Lane, Copyright 1963

Here are a few more of my other samplers needing some pressing to block the designs (make sure there’s no stretching out) and then framing. Part of the distortion is my poor photography;-)

Although modern day feminists scoff at needlework, personally I think needlework teaches many lessons way more useful than droning about the evil male patriarchy. It teaches patience, self-discipline and perseverance;-)

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Filed under American Character, American History, General Interest

July 9, 2016 · 2:25 pm

Another afternoon in the doctor’s waiting room

“Civilization is built on the practice of keeping promises. It may not sound a high attainment, but if trust in its observance be shaken the whole structure cracks and sinks. Any constructive effort and all human relations – personal, political, and commercial – depend on being able to depend on promises.”

– B.H. Liddell Hart, “Why We Don’t Learn From History”

The massacre of police officers in Dallas late Thursday night, that left 11 police officers shot, 5 fatally, continues to fuel politicians, pundits, political activists and assorted “experts” filling the airwaves and internet with analysis, insights, context, and plenty of SPIN (LIES). All these public mouthpieces yammer on about how to fix “this problem”. Politicians make a living talking about “the problems”, but hardly ever fix any of them. “This problem”, is not just black and white.

There are politicians fueling BLM, starting with President Obama and his minions at the White House. There are black grievance industry activists, many whom have become rich off the backs of “civil rights” activism in America. There are politicians on the right drawing a red line on the 2nd Amendment. There are two presidential campaigns trying to capitalize on looking “presidential” in this crisis. There are police officers across America outraged, saddened and worrying about how to protect their fellow citizens, while feeling under attack and more and more like walking targets wearing their uniforms. There are many angry black people being encouraged to take to the streets and demand “justice”. There are many angry white people too…… some racists, some who feel their right to own guns is under attack, some who are outraged about the police being attacked, etc., etc., etc. Again, “this problem” isn’t just black and white.

There is the Black Lives Matter movement, which at this point should be investigated by federal law enforcement, as to who is funding the movement, who is leading this movement, and determining if this group should be designated a terrorist group. BLM sure looks like an anarchist organization, working to fuel racial discord, encourage attacks on civil law enforcement and to fuel a breakdown of American society.

Fueling racial tensions in America has been a staple tactic of communist, far-left factions, and it is part of the political playbook of people very close to the Obama administration. Sorry, that’s the truth. Van Jones was part of an anarchist movement, an avowed Marxist and an advocate of inciting race wars to advance political change in America. President Obama follows the Cloward-Piven political strategy.

The mainstream press mentions President Obama’s background as a “community organizer” in Chicago often, but they never really explain the history of “community organizing”. Saul Alinksy, an American radical, dedicated to fueling racial tensions for political purposes, founded community organizing and whether you are a leftist who believes, you should never let a crisis go to waste, as Rahm Emmanuel once stated, or a right-winger, like Rush Limbaugh, who has filled talk radio with warnings about Alinsky, Cloward-Piven and political race hustlers, the fact is community organizing is all about sensationalizing racially charged issues for political purposes. That’s it in a nutshell.

Now, here’s a small snapshot of race interactions I saw last week.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in my primary care doctor’s waiting room. I had a bad week with my blood sugar and despite several medication changes in the past year to get my Type 2 diabetes back under control, it’s still not. Being put on insulin may be in my near future. Bad week is waking up Monday morning feeling nauseated, with a really bad headache, and feeling like my head was in a fog. Checked my blood sugar, 350. It’s down now, but not down where it needs to be. So, if some of my blog posts this past week were really bad, I’ll use the excuse that my head was in a fog from my diabetes, lol.

So, I was sitting there waiting to see my wonderful, Syrian-born doctor, whom I really think the world of, because beyond being a very good doctor, he always takes the time to talk to me like a person, not just a number. Some doctors treat you like you’re just a list of symptoms on a page to examine, diagnose and prescribe a remedy. My doctor looks me in the eye and listens to me.

While in his waiting room, CNN was playing on the TV, with more news on the Dallas massacre.

There were several other patients waiting, some white, some black. The receptionists were two black ladies. The receptionists know me as an established patient and they’re always smiling, helpful and wonderful. The other patients all behaved courteously and as I waited this elderly white lady showed up, walking with a cane.

I don’t know this lady’s name and the next time I see her, I need to get her name, but we know each other from my doctor’s waiting room and my work in a local store, where she shops often. She sat down next to me and we picked up talking about what’s been going on in our lives since the last time we chatted, without even a moment’s hesitation.

I wrote about this elderly white lady in a 2013 blog post, “An afternoon in the doctor’s waiting room”, and I’m going to repost the first and last paragraph of that post:

“We’re approaching that American holiday that’s come to symbolize two diverse cultures, American settlers and American Indians, oops Native Americans or whatever is the PC-approved term, sitting together to share a meal and offer thanks to God for a successful harvest. Agrarian societies through the ages have held similar celebrations at the end of the harvest season. The unique component of our Thanksgiving rests heavily on our national self-image of a melting pot of cultures living in harmony, where Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a place where we will “sit down at a table of brotherhood” evokes a national yearning for the America we hope we can someday be.”

And it ended:

“It’s not about making race the central theme at the dinner table, but to learn to make a seat at the table and feed as many people as possible that will lead us to the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Only by taking the time to get to know people, can you ever find out who they are. People will surprise you, if you let them. She told me that she won a motorcycle in a raffle recently, but she traded it in for a new Harley-Davidson trike. She ended our conversation by telling me, her husband doesn’t have to ask her twice if she wants to ride, because she has always loved to ride motorcycles.”

This lady’s son is a pastor working to build up a congregation for a non-denominational Protestant church and back in 2013 she invited me to her son’s church and yesterday she invited me again. She wasn’t pushy, but sincere, just as a black lady, who came to my door this week, inviting me to her Jehovah’s Witness church was sincere and seemed to be a very nice lady. Unlike many people, who get angry at Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to the door, I try always to be polite, because when I was young and newly married, a pair of them showed up at my door and I talked to them. I wasn’t so much curious about their religion, but why they go door-to-door, despite getting doors slammed in their face often. So, I asked them.

These two ladies pointed me to a Bible verse, Mark 6:7:

“And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits”

They explained that they go by twos to spread the Gospel. Now, I am not going to dissect their entire church doctrine, because I am not qualified, but just having a general understanding about why they do go door-to-door helped me to be more tolerant and respectful when they come to my door.

Last week, my friend, Gladius, a Southern Baptist, emailed me an audio link of a sermon, “The Faith of Our Founding Fathers”, which he gave at his local church last Sunday. He discussed the Christian faith of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. He laid out how much they put on the line by signing that declaration:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Gladius gave the statistics on how much many of the signers sacrificed, with many giving their very lives, during the Revolutionary War, to secure the freedoms most Americans take for granted today. A goodly number of them died fighting in the Revolutionary War, and while Gladius didn’t go into the grim details, here are a couple examples of what the men and women of the American Revolution sacrificed, from an article by Dr. Harold Pease, “The price paid for your liberty”:

“Unable to capture Abraham Clark, another signatory, the British took their wrath out on his two sons, who were imprisoned on the notorious prison ship Jersey. “Word was sent to Clark that his boys would be freed if he would disown the revolutionary cause and praise the British Crown. At his refusal, his sons were singled out for cruel treatment. One was placed in a tiny cell and given no food. Fellow prisoners kept him alive by laboriously pushing tiny bits of food through a keyhole. Both sons somehow survived their ordeal.””

Here’s another patriot’s sacrifice:

” The British had a particular zeal for destroying the homes and property of the signers. Those suffering this fate included Benjamin Harrison, George Clymer, Dr. John Witherspoon, Philip Livingston, William Hooper and William Floyd. The sacrifices of John Hart and Francis Lewis are particularly noteworthy. “While his wife lay gravely ill, Redcoats destroyed Hart’s growing crops and ripped his many grist mills to pieces. Bent on taking him, they chased him for several days. They almost nabbed him in a wooded area, but he hid in a cave. When he returned home with his health broken, he found his wife dead and their 13 children scattered.””

Dr. Pease states:

“Probably John Quincy Adams, a son of one of the 55 patriots making the above pledge and later a president of the United States, said it best. “Posterity — You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.” Let us never forget that liberty is not free. It was purchased and maintained by the blood of those before us.”

Gladius brought this same question to the forefront, “How much would you sacrifice for liberty?” It is something all Americans need to think about.

America does need people willing to fight with all their might to preserve our liberty, but truthfully, as one who abhors violence and loves America, perhaps the best way to fight for The Constitution is to quit with the warring political factions, quit with the endless partisan hot-headed rhetoric, quit with all the pointing fingers, but most of all:

“QUIT TREATING FELLOW AMERICANS AS YOUR ENEMY!”“

– Libertybelle, July 9, 2016

It’s time we all work as hard as we can to be Good Citizens.

It’s time for us to fight as hard as we can to unite as one nation dedicated to a common purpose – “Protecting and defending The Constitution”.

Perhaps, if we pledge “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to preserving our great nation, America can truly fulfill the dream expressed so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr. and at long last, “sit down at a table of brotherhood”

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Gladius Maximus, Politics, The Constitution

July 7, 2016 · 1:48 am

The War about Words (Part 2)

“Well,” said Maude, “there is nothing anyone can do to change human nature. That is the one immutable, in spite of the idealists, and Rousseau. For better or for worse, we are what we are.”

Charles thought for a while and when he spoke Maude did not consider his remark to be irrelevant: “In the old Roman religion — or was it Greek?–Justice was the last goddess to leave the world and left it to its own destruction. She never returned.”

– Ceremony of the Innocent, written by Taylor Caldwell (p. 346)

Words matter.

A few posts back I wrote Part I of the “War about Words”, which those aligned with the political left will dismiss without any consideration, because it’s critical of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. The same instant dismissal or obfuscations occur among the political right too, when the left attacks one of their political figures and then we have the Trump contingent too, who reject all criticisms of Trump, out of a belief that he is the last best hope for America.

Often my views draw fire from all sides, because I’m one of those annoying people who says what I think, regardless whether it agrees with a particular partisan or political agenda or whether it goes against all the “expert” opinion. I prefer to think not only for myself, but of myself as an American, first, last, always. I am free to think whatever the heck I want. That’s the wonder of America!

As a child, my mother sent us off to vacation Bible school at our village church (yes, PA still has villages) and in fact, one of my direct ancestors donated the land for that church during the early settlement of that area of northeast PA in the late 1700s. That church was a Lutheran church, but a Calvary Baptist church from another town ran a vacation Bible school in the summer too and they had a bus that picked up kids. My mother let us go to that church’s vacation Bible school several summers. They had all sorts of really interesting crafts and activities, but one summer, two women from that church took me aside and told me that girls are supposed to wear dresses and not cut their hair, which made me feel a deep sense of rebellion, as I sat there in shorts and with short hair. These ladies also told me that I needed to say I wanted “to be saved” or I was going to hell.

Ordinarily, I am a crybaby, coward, but the more these two women lectured me, the more resentful and rebellious I became, because quite frankly, my church never used the words “being saved”, so I did not even understand the phrase. I politely told these two ladies that I didn’t want “to be saved” . They kept pushing and finally I rebelled and told them that no matter what they said, I wasn’t going to say that. They told me I was going to hell. When I got home, I sat at the kitchen table and bawled, because confrontations always upset me. When I poured out my story, my mother told me I wasn’t going back there.

From where I stand, it sure looks like the partisan political factions’ endless fighting has America on the precipice that President George Washington warned about in his Farewell Address. Yesterday, FBI Director, James Comey, laid out the entire list of crimes Hillary Clinton committed by grossly negligent handling of classified information, through the setting up of a home-brew email server in her home. Director Comey decided not to recommend an indictment, citing that a “reasonable” prosecutor would not bring charges in this case. Of course, once again this announcement threw the pundits into an exploding heads frenzy, because Director Comey said Hillary Clinton’s actions were “extremely careless” rather than “grossly negligent”, but is there really a difference between the two?

Then Director Comey added the excuse that he found no malicious intent or intent to harm America in her actions. Of course, proving intent isn’t even required to indict under the statute, but here again, the words he carefully chose were meant to bury the email server scandal and smacked of being obviously for partisan political purposes. Those church women meant well, but the words they wanted me to say, were words I didn’t understand or believe. I believe Director James Comey decided to use words he fully understands, but didn’t really believe – I believe he caved to partisan political pressure from the White House. I believe he wanted to avoid a “constitutional crisis”, because the corruption goes all the way to the White House.

Today, many liberal news outlets were already burying Hillary’s email server scandal and focusing on Trump’s antics. To be fair, Trump hands them endless fodder with his imprudent, bizarre comments, like his latest praise of the late, brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein’s “no questions asked” internal policing policies against terrorists. Saddam killed a lot of terrorists inside Iraq, heck, he murdered ethnic minorities too. Trump likes strong-man leadership, but Saddam also gave safe haven to many terrorists leaders and funded terrorism abroad.

As, I’ve repeated, ad nauseum, since last Fall, Trump’s “GOP Insurgency”, waged with BILLIONS of dollars of free media, is a gift that continues giving to the Democrats, leaving the GOP in shambles, heading into a presidential election in November. The Democrats though are uniting around Hillary, despite the Bernie Sanders insurgency campaign, paid for by private campaign donations and with far-less media attention. The obvious, unfair and overt, media collusion by big media elites to facilitate the “GOP Insurgency”, found the media on the defensive with excuses for the obvious disparate media coverage… phrases like “earned media”, other candidates turn down interviews, etc., but make no mistake about the SPIN cycle form of INFORMATION WARFARE being waged by the political Left in America.

This SPIN is a totalitarian effort to control the ostensibly free mass media, through an orchestrated mass media saturation strategy, using relentless repetition of messages (the mindless talking points messaging), media collusion to disseminate those messages and a constant reinforcement of the “will of people” expressed through manufactured opinion cascades, that keep stating what the majority of Americans believe…….based on a relentless repetition of polling data (an unscientific sampling of a few people’s opinions extrapolated as reflecting the opinions of all Americans). The combination of messaging control and manufactured opinion cascades speaks to overt mass brainwashing by political and mass media elites and an overt long-term effort to quell free speech, but this form of INFORMATION WARFARE also grossly tips the balance to one political party’s agenda. This INFORMATION WARFARE strategy assures the Left’s political agenda dominates and becomes the “mainstream opinion”. Just watch how the relentless repetition turned a terrorist attack into an attack on Christians who oppose gay marriage and more gun control. The Left also mobilizes celebrity and big name “experts” to aid their SPIN operations.

Oh, but look how they covered Trump? Doesn’t that prove the media does give Republicans” ample coverage, well, that depends on how you define “Republican”….. and the media told us Trump is the “GOP Insurgent intent on burning down the GOP establishment”. Alas, here again, we come up against definitions. What is the GOP establishment, if not the GOP?

With Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal, the liberal media will do damage control for Hillary, just like they aided leftist partisans to rewrite that Orlando “narrative” within two weeks. In that Orlando case, a short-lived brouhaha ensued when the Justice Department tried to censor the shooter’s 911 call and remove the shooter’s references to Islamic terrorism (the shooter pledged allegiance to ISIS and declared he was committing jihad). Under a public backlash, Lynch released the 911 tape, but the shooter’s words even then were altered.

Words matter a great deal to those who use them to control public perception and manipulate the truth. The Orlando shooting was usurped and turned into blaming Christian anti-gay people for the hate and promoting more gun control legislation. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, came out and declared we need more “love” to combat “hate”, thus advancing the left’s narrative to make it about right-wing haters and gun control rather than about radical Islamic terrorism.

In this email server scandal there’s a discernible series of actions by key players in the past week, that made it obvious that the Obama administration wanted this scandal to go away very quickly.

President Obama arranged last week to hit the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton yesterday. Loretta Lynch had a clandestine 3o minute meeting with former president, Bill Clinton, at the airport in Phoenix last week. Lynch described that meeting as just a chat about grandchildren, golf and BREXIT. She played that meeting off with a news conference, proclaiming she would accept the recommendation of the FBI on the email server case. Just like that the news broke that the FBI would interview Hillary Clinton on Saturday (a holiday weekend no less). And on Tuesday, July 5, 2016 Director Comey came out and announced no reasonable prosecutor would indict. Today, Loretta Lynch came out and said she accepted Director Comey’s recommendation. Case closed. Hillary Clinton’s minions are out in full force, saying “it’s time to move on”.

Like rats stuck on a wheel, the Republicans in Congress, came out and announced they are going to have Director Comey testify before Congress tomorrow, to answer their questions about his decision not to recommend an indictment of Hillary Clinton. The hearings that go nowhere again……. it’s like being trapped in a strategy that is doomed to fail and you’d think the Republicans would learn that they never win. The Dems, with their liberal friends, control almost all the big media in America and their talking points messaging always controls who wins.

This is like constantly repeating a script that always ends the same way or that Einstein quote about people who do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. The media and the Clinton team will opine, using their perennially tired, but always successful talking point…. “this is another right-wing witch hunt”. The Republicans will pontificate, the media will declare Hillary won, and she will continue her march to the White House, because here’s the truth – she really is ABOVE THE LAW.

Today, I clicked on some news sites that are liberal-leaning and Hillary’s email server wasn’t a top news story, but Donald Trump’s Saddam Hussein comment was. The liberal media was “moving on”. Within a few more days, the email server scandal will be old news and besides FOX News talking to Trump supporters and right-wing online sites, the Clinton propaganda squad can add another media messaging coup feather to their cap.

Having personally experienced what happens if you get in the way of the Clinton propaganda efforts, during the impeachment scandal, I feel compelled to keep speaking out and to keep trying to find a way to expose their criminal abuse of power. The details of my experience are under the Messages of mhere tab on my home page, but what I want to talk about here is what made me so determined to fight them then and what makes me determined to fight to expose their corruption now. America can’t survive if political machines can control the media and blatantly subvert the law. A common thread, that the pollsters and pundits keep telling us drove the Trump and Sanders “insurgent” campaigns, is American discontent with powerful elites playing by a different set of rules and that the system is rigged.

America is a unique experiment in the history of world government. Americans believe in individual liberty:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

In the post right before this one, I linked to a piece at the Legal Insurrection blog, where William A Jacobson relates a Twitter exchange with Karol Marcowicz that precisely captures the perilous point America is at. Jacobson writes:

The best truly big picture view I saw was from Karol Markowicz, a columnist for the NY Post and an ex-Soviet who moved the the United States as a child.

In response to the Comey verdict, Markowicz tweeted out a statement as to how others who came from the USSR expected no other result:

.“Guys, the ex-president’s wife was never going to get indicted.”-all my USSR-born friends”

Jacobson goes on to say:

“She linked in the tweet to a post of hers on her personal website from 2013, which has this sentence in it referring to Americans who complained about their government:

“They weren’t born in a country where hundreds of years of backward government had led to this kind of cynicism that gets passed on from parents to children.”

I understood what she meant. While I wasn’t born in and didn’t grow up in the USSR, I studied there and vicariously came to know the cynicism of the system, particularly through refusenikfriends.

It wasn’t just that the powerful were above the law or there was no rule of law. It was in another dimension.

I tweeted back:

“Those who lived under communism understand exactly what just happened.”

http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/07/those-who-lived-under-communism-understand-exactly-what-just-happened/

I have been thinking a great deal about what I consider cultural DNA, with how peoples the world over develop patterns of behavior ( culture) that endure, despite the changes in government. In fact, the people’s behavior determines how long and how much control they will tolerate from their government, to maintain the status quo and social order.

Above: My copy of “Letters from Russia. To the right is a folk-art wooden container my son brought back from Russia, painted in a Russian folk art style called Khohkloma.

Thinking about what to write in this Part 2 post, I ordered a book, which I had read about a long while back, that explains the Russian cultural DNA, a few years after Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America. That cultural DNA still persists in Russia today. The book is “Letters from Russia” and like de Tocqueville’s, “Democracy in America”, the book on Russia was written by another French nobleman, Astolphe de Custine. Although his trip to Russia in 1839 was only three months long, he captured life in Russia under the despot, Czar Nicholas I, in such prescient, stark detail, that historians still study his letters. His book was banned by both, Czar Nicholas I and the Bolsheviks, who didn’t much like Custine’s letters. I can relate, heck, my posts on the Excite message boards in 1998 evoked quite a response too and there I was fighting hordes of new posters who showed up to take over the boards with the Clinton talking points……… hummm, I likened them to being like Genghis Khan.

In their own words these two French noblemen present their opinions on the cultural DNA differences between a people who accept rulers and a people who don’t. In 1996, renowned journalist, Steven Erlanger, wrote a NY Times piece on Custine’s book, that gives you Custine in his own words. Here’s a short excerpt:

“In Russia, everything you notice, and everything that happens around you, has a terrifying uniformity; and the first thought that comes into the traveler’s mind, as he contemplates this symmetry, is that such entire consistency and regularity, so contrary to the natural inclination of mankind, cannot have been achieved and could not survive without violence. . . . Officially, such brutal tyranny is called respect for unity and love of order; and this bitter fruit of despotism appears so precious to the methodical mind that you are told it cannot be purchased at too high a price.

Faced with the pervasiveness of the secret police and the immensity of the bureaucracy, Custine at first is shocked. He sees the dead weight that these hordes of state employees place on Russia, and their own dehumanization.

Among Russian officials, attention to detail is quite compatible with disorganization. They go to a great deal of trouble to achieve some petty end, never satisfed that they have done enough to demonstrate their zeal. Consequently, in this rivalry between employees, one formality does not guarantee the foreigner against another. It is like a pillaging army: because the traveler has passed through the hands of one regiment, this does not prevent him from meeting another, or a third, and each of these bands spaced out along his route vies with the last in harassing him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/weekinreview/word-for-word-marquis-de-custine-long-ago-look-russia-so-what-else-new.html?pagewanted=all

Interestingly, in the introduction to “Letters from Russia”, editor, Anka Muhlstein, presents the bulls-eye de Tocqueville quote on the difference between America and Russia:

“There are on earth today two great peoples who, having started from different points, seem to be advancing towards the same end: they are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. They both grew up in darkness and whilst Europeans were busy elsewhere, they suddenly placed themselves in the forefront of nations, and the world learned at almost the same time of their births and their greatness

All other nations seem, more or less, to have reached the limits nature has assigned to them and within which they now need only to remain, but those two are still growing…. America is struggling against obstacles of nature,; Russia against men…. The principal means of action for the one is liberty, for the other servitude.”

Letters from Russia, by Astolphe de Custine, edited and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein, page ix of the introduction.

America is the only place on earth that broke that mold completely and set up a government meant for the people to have control over the government and for the individual’s rights to be paramount.

We are a nation built by free-thinking and free-acting citizens.

Central to our culture is the belief that all men are equal before the law and that the rule of law applies to EVERYONE. This week’s disgraceful display of open corruption and obvious undue political influence from the White House, all for partisan purposes, made me wonder if we are now a banana republic.

For a long while, years in fact, I have been studying the Clinton SPIN and then the Obama NARRATIVE and now we have Trump borrowing the Clinton SPIN too and here’s truth – SPIN is the American people allowing their elected leaders to bold-faced LIE to them.

Every politician who engages in the talking points messaging is using a totalitarian messaging tactic to CONTROL the NEWS the American people receive. That relentless repetition is a form of mass media brainwashing of the people.

Allowing this attack on American FREE speech principles to advance without even a recognition of how pernicious and corrupting it is, will lead to not only a surrender of our free speech, but will allow those with power to dictate the “facts” and which words we MUST use. They will have the power to impose what “truths” we must believe and which “truths” we can speak.

I refuse to ever submit to tyranny and instead of accepting that it’s the “old news, let’s move on”, Americans need to think long and hard if they want to be passive sheep fed what to believe or if they want to be FREE. Being FREE isn’t just about “rights”, it requires people willing to do their duty as good citizens too.

Despite Director Comey’s attempt to kick the can down the road, a constitutional crisis is already upon us, because it’s now out in the open that Hillary Clinton did egregiously and knowingly break the law. Both the Director of the FBI and the Attorney General of the United States did nothing to hold her accountable. This isn’t just about Hillary’s corruption though, it’s the Clinton political machine, a vast, network at work. I got burned by that machine during impeachment, where a retired general was fed false information about me and sent to silence me. That general became a FOB and continues to be a hack to sell the Clinton and Democrat agenda. Lacking any way to prove what happened to me has kept me from naming names. I already tried contacting several journalists a long time ago and offered them the real names of everyone in my Messages of mhere story. None of them even responded and despite the escalating exposure of the Clinton corruption, her own private email server to conduct all of her official State Department business, her off-the-books private team of intelligence operatives, Sidney Blumenthal and Tyler Drumheller, does it sound so far-fetched that she would hunt down an annoying poster on a popular message boards, whose comments were being borrowed and used by GOP pundits to break through their SPIN? I believe in their investigation into who I am, they came across this retired general who hates my guts and who jumped at the chance to get even with me. I believe the Clinton machine set the attack on me in motion as a part of their vast network of operations, to make sure Bill Clinton survived impeachment. I believe they sank to corrupting the military chain of command in the attack on me. Would anyone even care, even if I could prove it?

Do Americans still have the true grit necessary to save our republic? I have my doubts. Everyone is looking for either corrupt Hillary and con man Trump to save our republic, but really this is going to take all of us to put in our oars and help row.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Messages of mhere, Politics, Public Corruption, The Constitution, The Media

July 4, 2016 · 2:36 pm

Let Freedom Ring

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Filed under American Character, American History, General Interest

July 1, 2016 · 3:34 pm

The “War about Words” (Part 1)

“What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/14/482041137/president-obama-slams-yapping-over-radical-islam-and-terrorism

Words matter.

Words give meaning to what we believe, think, hope, dream, in essence to who we are. Words matter a great deal in our interactions with others, but they matter infinitely more to political leaders, especially the one joined at the hip to his teleprompter.

I’m going to divide this post into two parts. This first part is just a ~~short~~ , okay on rereading this, I admit it’a lonnng, rambling commentary on Leftists in America defining events, creating phrases to alter perception of events, and editing out key information to alter official documentation of events, all to create a version of events that fits their political agenda. The second part, well, I want to discuss some things I’ve been thinking about in regards to leaders trying to control what people think.

Years ago, I read a book, “The Words We Live By: The Creeds, Mottoes, And Pledges That Have Shaped America”, by Brian Burrell, that I had signed out at my local library. A few years ago, I was thinking about that book and ordered it. Brian Burrell related how he began his journey into collecting and studying the history of “the words Americans live by” watching and then later helping his father collect the words and messages on public monuments, tombstones, on buildings, etc. His father’s interest in these words spurred an interest and hobby in Burrell as a young boy, which he pursued into adulthood and ended up writing a book about these words.

Above: A book my mother sent me when I was a young soldier in Germany in 1980. She added a four-leaf clover that my father found, because he was an expert at finding four-leaf clovers. As a child, when my brothers and sisters and I were crawling around on the ground in a clover patch searching for a four-leaf clover, my father stood there and within a few seconds he would lean down and find one. He said, “You need to stand back and look at the entire patch.” That is big picture/little picture;-)

I’ve been not only fascinated by words from my earliest memories, but intimidated by words. I admire great orators and people with perfect elocution. Being a life-long recovering stutterer, with bouts of sudden relapses, I stick to safe, easily pronounced words and avoid public-speaking at all costs, knowing the chances of turning into a blubbering mass of incoherent muck is very high. As a child I spent time almost every day studying the dictionary. I loved Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” and could relate to her joy at mastering, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” One of my sons returned from a trip to PA recently where he had visited my family and he came bearing gifts, among them was a cookbook compiled by my childhood church and another old dictionary, which one of my sisters felt sure I’d like.

Growing up, our elderly pastor’s wife, a lovely Jewish lady educated at Columbia’s Teachers College, devoted a great deal of time trying to instill in me an appreciation of opera, classical music, the arts and learning in general. That a Jewish young lady from New York City could fall in love and marry a backwoods Protestant pastor and settle happily into a PA Dutch rural community is one of those quintessential American stories.

The parsonage was right across the road from my childhood home, making our pastor’s wife our next-door neighbor too. I felt like I had been blessed with another grandmother to have her as our neighbor growing up, with her treating my brothers and sisters as part of her family and her devotion to taking me under her wing, to teach and guide me. She kept reminding me that I needed to always pursue a classical liberal education. She let me borrow her copy of Bartlett’s Quotations many times and she often would hand me slips of paper where she had jotted down memorable quotes that she thought I would find interesting and like Burrell’s father and his notebook of American words, my pastor’s wife urged me to keep a notebook of quotes. I still have that notebook and I still jot down quotes often. I also listen carefully to the words political leaders use, but what you need to beware of always is the words they refuse to use and try to banish others from using.

Written words often stick in my mind for years and listening to President Obama and his entire administration explain their concerted purge of any mention of Islam and Jihad from the military and federal government terrorism training and the insertion of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated “Islamic experts” into government positions to guide (control) the “narrative”, well, it’s obvious some words matter a great deal to President Obama too.

This book on words that shaped America came to mind when I listened to President Obama and Hillary try to trivialize the importance of the words we use to describe the radical Islamic terrorists, who have declared jihad on America. Of course, President Obama, CAIR and many others, who refuse to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, also rush to insist those engaged in committing murderous acts of terrorism against Americans, while proclaiming they are waging jihad, aren’t really Islamic. They say this, while, many revered Islamic scholars in the Muslim world praise these acts as totally in keeping with Islamic law.

Throughout the past seven years of the Obama administration, reports occur with alarming regularity about incidents of military training documents being purged of any references to Islamic terror, Christian evangelicals and former American soldiers being listed as likely potential “right-wing terrorists”, an actual act of Islamic terrorism at a US military installation being dubbed “workplace violence”, official documents and videos being edited, more than 50 intelligence analysts in Iraq claiming higher ups are altering their reports to feed the Obama “narrative“, WH administration staffers engaged in rewriting their version of events into a “narrative” to fit their political agenda, and even the administration sending the national security adviser to the Sunday morning talk shows to cast an American soldier, who deserted his unit in Afghanistan, as an “American hero”.

President Obama’s angry scold, about which words we use to describe the latest act of radical Islamic terrorism on June 12, 2016, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando,FL., matters a great deal, because a full-court effort has ensued, with many leftist publications, pundits and the White House determined to cast doubt on this being a “radical Islamic terrorist” attack. When the DOJ tries to edit the 911 tapes, then rewrites the transcript, omitting the terrorists’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS and a full-court effort plays out where a new “narrative” is advanced, to deceive the American public, it’s obvious some words matter a great deal to President Obama.

In two weeks time the media, in collusion with the Obama administration muddied the information about the Orlando shooting to the point that reading many left-wing pundits and publications, it seems like they hold Christian haters responsible for the Orlando shooting and not the radical Islamic terrorist. The Obama administration could take a disgraced and dishonorable soldier, SGT Bergdahl, and with the full power of the commander-in-chief’s office, attempt to convince the American people this soldier served with “honor and distinction”. The bold-faced lying and rewriting the “narrative” (the official record) by the highest level of our government should alarm every American.

Years ago, many of us were dismayed by Obama’s “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” hollow phrases gathering wings and lofting his rapt followers into flights of fancy and head-in-the-clouds euphoria. Over seven years later, hearing President Obama dismiss which words are used to describe “radical Islamic terrorist” attacks in America, it seemed not only disingenuous, but downright deliberately deceitful. His relentless “War about Words” during his tenure as President really has led to a “fundamental transformation” of America. We now have Americans firmly entrenched into tiptoeing through an ever-changing minefield of words that are dangerous to use in public and words you must use to avoid public ostracism. Washington DC initiated a new speech code for the workplace to show sensitivity to transgenders, with made-up words, like ze and zir that they insist workers use. Facebooks has over 50 gender choices to choose from and old relics, like me, still live in a world where gender is based on human biology. The insistence on specific new pronouns all workers in Washington DC should use, with the guide being for Washington DC employers to be the trainers and implementers of this new speech code, replete with examples of “best practices” to avoid offending transgender people offers an example of the brave, new world American leftists are imposing on Americans. The Leftist War about words blows hot across America.

Alas, many Republicans and conservatives aren’t immune from being easily conned by demagogues either. “How could so many supposedly smart, independent-minded Americans fall for Obama’s hollow rhetoric?”, many Republicans and conservatives lamented, then along came Donald J. Trump selling the American Dream encapsulated in the hollow phrase, “Make America Great Again!” In even greater dismay, many Republicans and conservatives began to see fellow Republicans and conservatives fall under the spell of Trump’s reality-TV style demagoguery, presented in fast-talking, brash NY street tough antics.

Trying to explain this dichotomy of Americans who boldly proclaim their principles and independent-thinking, then become devoted followers of obvious con men and demagogues, I remembered this book by Brian Burrell. He relates DeTocqueville’s observations on Americans from 1831 and perhaps this American characteristic still gets passed on in our cultural DNA. DeTocqueville identified the American reliance on “experts”, that still persists today:

“On his visit to the United States, Tocqueville noticed that the Americans he encountered tended to exhibit two opposing tendencies: they did not want to be told what to do or think, and yet their collective will could easily be rallied behind certain carefully chosen words, to which he gave a name. “In the United States, Tocqueville concluded, “the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of the individuals who are thus relieved from having to form opinions of their own.””

pages 4-5, The Words We Live By: The Creeds, Mottoes, And Pledges That have Shaped America, by Brian Burrell

This word game charade goes much deeper than President Obama and it goes far deeper than just the debate over what to call the terrorists who scream, “Allah Akbar!

Today, the FBI questioned Hillary Clinton for 3.5 hours according to the news reports and here again is a politician who plays endless semantics games. She’s married to the former President who turned parsing into a deluxe linguistics game of charades…… “that depends on what is, is”. Hillary has been at pains to explain the FBI investigation as a benign “security review” today. Here’s an ABC report on her campaign’s statement:

Hillary Clinton gave a “voluntary interview” to the FBI today regarding her email arrangements while she was secretary of state, her campaign says.

“Secretary Clinton gave a voluntary interview this morning about her email arrangements while she was Secretary,” spokesman Nick Merrill said. “She is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion. Out of respect for the investigative process, she will not comment further on her interview.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-voluntary-interview-fbi-emails-campaign/story?id=40301595

The political Left in America has been waging a war about words for decades. President Obama and Hillary Clinton didn’t invent this game, in fact, the strategy of people in power, to control what people do, think, write and say is part of the history of the world’s tyrants and it’s one that Americans took a stand against from the beginning of our republic. Americans refuse to bow to rulers and we refuse to allow the government to control our speech. Whenever people in power exert a great deal of effort into controlling which words, not only the government uses, but which words the media uses, which words students and teachers can and cannot utter, and even policing the words they deem as “hate speech”, beware!

Americans have been conditioned to believe they are so unique and safe from despotism, that they have no idea how quickly FREEDOM can be lost.

Americans need to be constantly vigilant about those in power creating their own version of history, as part two of this “War about words” will be about some of history’s lessons learned in the long record of those with power trying to control what other people not only do, but what they can say and think.

Finally, one of my favorite quotes is from the 1902 American novel, The Virginian by Owen Wister, that I’ve loved for decades, because it speaks to so many American themes that are near and dear to my heart, the battle between good and evil, the matter of seeking justice, the American scorn for elites and social snobbery, the American spirit of rugged individualism, the belief in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and our eternal optimism and can-do spirit. Plus, there’s a charming love story running through the novel too. And of course, The Virginian became the stereotype for the American cowboy and I just adore American cowboys, past and present;-) The quote goes to this warning about being careful what you let other people convince you to think and believe:

“When a man ain’t got no ideas of his own, he’d ought to be kind o’ careful who he borrow ’em from.”

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, Food for Thought, General Interest, Politics, Uncategorized

June 14, 2016 · 11:55 pm

“American identity”

Today is almost over, but I wanted to mention that today was Flag Day and I came across this passage from the Roger Kimball book, “The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia”, that eloquently expresses the hope for America:

Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. —J. H. St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin … would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. —Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, 1913

A FEW YEARS AGO, on a trip to Maryland, I stopped at Baltimore Harbor with my wife and five-year-old son to see Fort McHenry, the site, in September 1814, of the Battle of Baltimore, a decisive episode in the War of 1812. It was a glorious spring day: the sky was an infinite azure punctuated by a flotilla of stately white clouds. Our first stop was a modern outbuilding adjacent to the eighteenth-century fort. We crowded into a small theater with about thirty fourth-graders and their teachers to watch a short film. Among other things, we learned about the origins of the war, about how the British took and burned Washington, about how at last a thousand U.S. troops under George Armistead at Fort McHenry successfully defended their bastion against the British naval onslaught, saving Baltimore and turning the tide of the war.

It was (as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo) “a damn nice thing— the nearest run thing you ever saw.” The British ships, anchored out of range of Armistead’s cannons, pounded the fort with mortar and Congreve rocket fire over the course of twenty-five hours. Sitting on a truce ship behind the British fleet was a young American lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key. He watched as the battle raged, dappling the night sky with noisy coruscations.

Sometime before sunrise, the bombardment suddenly stopped. Key was uncertain of the battle’s outcome until dawn broke and he saw the American flag fluttering boldly above Fort McHenry. (When he had taken command, Armistead asked for an extra large flag so that “the British would have no trouble seeing it from a distance.”) There would be no surrender. The Brits abandoned their plans to invade Baltimore. The war would soon be over. As soon as he caught sight of Old Glory, Francis Scott Key began scribbling what would become “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the back of a letter. He finished it in a hotel in Baltimore a day or two later. The poem was an instant hit and was soon set to “The Anacreontic Song,” an eighteenth-century English drinking tune. It became the official national anthem in 1931.

The film ended and strains of the song began floating out from the loudspeakers— softly at first, then louder and louder. Everyone in the room scrambled to his feet.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The schoolchildren stood reverently, each with his right hand over his heart. A floor-length curtain wheeled back, flooding the room with light. There was Fort McHenry. And there, rising above it, was the American flag, waving gently in the breeze. With the possible exception of our son, who was busy attacking The Enemy with his toy F14, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Of course, that calculated piece of theater was in part an exercise in sentimentality. Is that a bad thing? Wallace Stevens may have been right that, in general, “sentimentality is a failure of feeling”— a sign of counterfeit emotion rather than the real thing. Nevertheless, there is a place for a bit of affirmative sentimentality in the moral economy of our society. Among other things, it provides emotional glue for our shared identity as Americans. These days, perhaps more than ever before, that identity needs glue. As we contemplate the prospects for America and its institutions in the twenty-first century, it is not only particular cultural and social institutions that deserve scrutiny. What we might call the institution of American identity— of who we are as a people— also requires our attention.

Kimball, Roger (2012-07-04). The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (Kindle Locations 754-793). St. Augustine’s Press. Kindle Edition.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Food for Thought, General Interest

June 9, 2016 · 3:52 pm

A “great” American history revisionist

Aside from his many talents and all-around “greatness”, joining the ranks of Elizabeth Warren and her Cherokee heritage and Hillary being named after a world-famous explorer, we can now add American history revisionist to Donald J. Trump’s resumé.

From www.redstate.com:

“WAIT! Donald Trump Is To Give A Speech Near The Site Of A Civil War Battle He Made Up?”:

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Next week, Donald Trump announced that he was going to give major campaign speech and had selected the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, as the venue.

The event planning then played out in front of reporters.

“I don’t even know where yet. I think we are gonna do it in Washington at the club,” Trump said about delivering the speech at Trump National Golf Course in suburban Virginia. “Let’s do it at the club,” he said, turning to Hope Hicks, his top press aide. “I wouldn’t mind doing it on the Potomac.”

“I almost would love to do it right at the flag,” Trump said.”

The Redstate article references a November 2015 NY Times story:

STERLING, Va. — When Donald J. Trump bought a fixer-upper golf club on Lowes Island here for $13 million in 2009, he poured millions more into reconfiguring its two courses. He angered conservationists by chopping down more than 400 trees to open up views of the Potomac River. And he shocked no one by renaming the club after himself.

But that wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump also upgraded its place in history.

Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”

The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

Like many of Mr. Trump’s claims, the inscription was evidently not fact-checked.”

Further on in the story, several Civil War historians are quoted refuting Trump’s claim that this was the site of his made-up “River of Blood” and he is quoted responding:

“Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him that the golf club site was known as the River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.

Then he said the historians had spoken not to him but to “my people.” But he refused to identify any underlings who might still possess the historians’ names.

“Write your story the way you want to write it,” Mr. Trump said finally, when pressed unsuccessfully for anything that could corroborate his claim. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. But many people were shot. It makes sense.””

That’s his story and he’s sticking to it…

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Filed under American History, General Interest, Military, Politics

May 30, 2016 · 1:15 pm