This year has been very difficult for me to get blog posts written, despite good intentions. My dearth of writing is a combination of my husband’s daily care takes up more of my time, leaving me emotionally drained many days. Also, the constant media/Trump hysteria disgust me to the point of total burnout on following the news. Added to all that, often lately my old problem of sitting down to write, then getting stuck on what to write about strikes, resulting in more time spent talking myself into defeat about my desire to write than I do actually writing. I keep wondering if anything I write makes even a drop of difference in the vast raging seas of political punditry and commentary.
The question that swirls in my mind lately is does what I write just throw more fuel on our extreme partisanship or does it offer anything informative, positive, or hopeful? It’s a challenge for me not to write Trump, Dem and media bashing invective
Ordinarily, I’d be totally on board writing about serious and currently popular cultural topics like civility and rebuilding some common ground, but often I think my cynical son probably has it right when he insists we have the society we deserve and he sees 2016, with two thoroughly corrupt candidates, as the fitting candidates for our “almost too stupid to exist” culture. Despite being a very Pollyanna-type person, lately I wonder if perhaps he’s right, then I dig in on my Libertybelle American cheerleader beliefs and refuse to surrender to the spreading cultural and political corruption, the disturbing escalating partisan hatred and the chaos resulting from leadership vacuums everywhere I turn.
Negativity aside, I’ve seen some good pieces written on civility and positive advice for our ailing spirit. Here are the links to a four-part series Carly Fiorina recently wrote. I had mentioned the first part in a previous blog post and all four are very positive and worth a read:
The thing I liked about Carly Fiorina as a presidential candidate, was something I consider a very important trait of a good leader – she invested a lot of time and energy into reading up on issues and policies. She showed up to debates very prepared to debate real issues and policies. When she gave interviews, she could speak articulately about serious matters and she had a lot of positive ideas. I will always prefer leaders who display the good character trait of investing a lot of time into studying and preparing when tackling complex issues or taking seriously their duty to any office or position they hold. During the GOP primary Trump attacked “that face”, but in my book, Carly Fiorina is a face worth respect and admiration.
Last night I came across an article,The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture, by Margaret Talbot, at The New Yorker about classical sculpture. This article hit me like a jolt and totally blew apart everything else I had ever thought that I knew about ancient Greek and Roman sculptures:
“Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, like most people, he thought of Greek and Roman statues as objects of pure white marble. The gods, heroes, and nymphs displayed in museums look that way, as do neoclassical monuments and statuary, from the Jefferson Memorial to the Caesar perched outside his palace in Las Vegas.
Aphrodisias was home to a thriving cadre of high-end artists until the seventh century A.D., when an earthquake caused it to fall into ruin. In 1961, archeologists began systematically excavating the city, storing thousands of sculptural fragments in depots. When Abbe arrived there, several decades later, he started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”
There’s a link in this New Yorker article to a touring exhibition, Gods of Color, with lots of photos of statues painted to what is believed to be the original paint colors.
Color me totally amazed at learning this and still reeling at trying to readjust my thinking that the aesthetic value we place on the beauty of classical white marble statues was not how the ancients displayed these statues.
Just as a memory refresher, let’s go back to June 2016, when Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Arizona. What followed was a loud cry about an appearance of impropriety, Lynch insisting the meeting was a non-political chat about grandchildren, etc. and then Lynch made the announcement that she would not recuse herself from the Clinton email investigation, but instead she would rely on FBI director, James Comey’s recommendations. This meeting set in motion the FBI interview of Hillary on a 4th of July weekend.
In September 2016, the FBI released the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview and as I had begun reading these FBI notes on the email investigation, the redactions seemed odd to me. I blogged about this and tweeted about it too. In Hillary’s interview, I wrote:
Above is the first paragraph of the FBI Interview Notes. It lists Hillary Clinton’s attorneys present for this interview. One name is redacted and one can only wonder why?
On July 2, 2016, the New York Times reported:
Accompanying Mrs. Clinton into the meeting were her lawyer David E. Kendall; Cheryl D. Mills and Heather Samuelson, longtime aides who are also lawyers; and two lawyers from Mr. Kendall’s firm, Williams & Connolly, Katherine Turner and Amy Saharia.
Eight officials from the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice conducted the interview, according to a person who was familiar with the substance of the session but declined to be named because the meeting was private. This person characterized the meeting as “civil” and “businesslike.”
So, was the other attorney Amy Saharia, as the New York Times reported back in July, or was it someone else? Why on earth redact the name, if it was Saharia???
There are several redactions on who was present from the DOJ. The FBI Notes list two people from the DOJ/FBI side and have three names redacted, which comes to 5 names, although the NY Times story says there were 8 DOJ/FBI people present, so who are 3 redacted names + 3 others mentioned in the NY Times story??? Even if that one long block of redaction, after David Laufman’s name is more than one name, we are still left with knowing only 2 names of who was present from the FBI/DOJ and leaves SIX unknowns. Something is very wrong when you compare the NY Times report to the FBI Notes.
I kept wondering why on earth the FBI redacted only one name of Clinton’s legal team and why on earth would that name be Amy Saharia, when the Clintons released her name to the New York Times in July, so it wasn’t like it was a secret. Then I kept wondering why would Bill Clinton risk that personal meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in AZ, when if the only thing to iron out was a date and time for Hillary to do a FBI interview. Well, there had to be some details that Bill Clinton wanted to convey personally to a trusted Clinton crony, like Loretta Lynch. I strongly suspect that Bill Clinton arranged for either himself or a another trusted Clinton crony to be present for Hillary’s interview, to make sure nothing went wrong. I’ve always wondered about someone, perhaps like Eric Holder, whom none of the FBI or DOJ officials would dream of questioning or crossing.
And I believe that FBI interview of Hillary put James Comey in an even more totally compromised position, but he made his decision to go with the Clinton narrative when he made his statement on July 5, 2016. He spent about 15 minutes chronicling grossly negligent handling of classified information, followed by making up new law and excuses to exonerate Hillary. He decided to go along with the Clinton corruption, probably assuming Hillary would be his next boss.
On that same day in July, Hillary Clinton was on Air Force One with President Obama heading to their first joint campaign event.
What we don’t know is when those several FBI field office investigations into Clinton Foundation corruption began and when James Comey knew about them.
That timeline would assuredly tell us if Comey got sucked into the Clinton corruption or if he was already working hard to cover up Clinton corruption under investigation in several FBI field offices. The Hillary interview was in July 2016 and in October 2016 Comey reopened the email investigation. On November 2, 2016 Bret Baier at FOX News reported:
Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI. He reveals five important new pieces of information in these two short clips:
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told Baier that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information have been taken from it.
This report would indicate the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation was ongoing before the July 2016 FBI interview of Hillary and the FBI was sitting on Bill Clinton’s personal Clinton Foundation server, which Hillary had merged her State Dept emails onto and all those disappearing emails didn’t ring any alarm bells at the highest level of the FBI???
In October 2016, when the leaks started coming out about the Clinton Foundation criminal investigations and the Weiner laptop, Comey and McCabe worked to silence the leaks and COVER-UP for the Clintons. Comey reopened the email investigation strictly as a damage control effort, so he could pronounce a thorough investigation had occurred. He was all-in on covering up for the Clintons.
When the DOJ IG investigated the email investigation, Comey hung McCabe out to dry and said he didn’t know anything about McCabe authorizing FBI leaks to do damage control on the leaks coming out of NY about the Clinton Foundation investigations. McCabe said Comey was aware of it and it seems certain Comey knew all about it, because he was helping orchestrate the cover-up and trying to bury the Clinton Foundation investigations, just like he buried the email investigation.
A few things have been bugging me since I wrote my last blog post. Here are a few quick thoughts.
In the 8/9/18 John Soloman piece in The Hill quoted in this blog post something keeps bothering me about how the Obama DOJ and FBI handled information coming from Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele and now we find out DNC-linked lawyer, Michael Sussmann too. What did the FBI actually do to try to verify this information? James Comey and other top Obama officials have often stated some of the Steele dossier is verified, however none of them or the Dem spinmeisters ever mention anything except the Trump Golden Showers and Cohen in Prague.
Now, with this Soloman report on Bruce Ohr’s testimony, well, here’s the part that struck me as bizarre:
“A couple of the experts flagged that most of what Simpson allegedly told Ohr was not from Moscow — where the alleged plot was supposed to be based — but from a reported Russian in the United States who later seemed to disappear, according to Ohr’s notes.”
Did Ohr relay this information to the FBI? Did the FBI try to identify and locate this Russian source in America? If so, what did they find out? If not, well, why the hell not?
It just seems like these top people in the Obama DOJ and FBI were intent on investigating only the Trump campaign and willing to use Hillary campaign/DNC op dirt as the flimsy pretext to do so.
As each little bit of truth gets exposed, it looks more and more like an orchestrated effort to take down Trump and once Trump was elected, Comey, Clapper, Brennan appear to have become key players in the effort to destroy Trump’s presidency, by any means necessary. For a long time, I believed there had to be some legitimate intelligence they were using, but it’s looking more and more like they relied solely on Clinton/DNC op dirt filtered to them through Steele, Simpson and now we find out about this DNC-connected lawyer Michael Sussmann.
And at the same time Comey was peddling this Steele/Simpson dirt, he was working to shut down the field office investigations into the Clinton Foundation. That quickie Weiner laptop investigation was a PR move to give cover that the FBI had “thoroughly” investigated that laptop and “nothing to see here”, which went with the Clinton SPIN that poor Huma had no idea those emails were backing up to the Weiner home laptop. Comey let McCabe take the hit in the IG investigation into the email investigation. McCabe said Comey was aware of the FBI leak efforts to counter the leaks coming out of NY about the FBI criminal investigations into the Clinton Foundation in several states.
Comey was the one who briefed Trump about the Steele dossier dirt, then Comey was the one to keep talking to Trump privately reassuring Trump that he wasn’t the target of an investigation, stringing Trump along and trying to incriminate him. Then Comey immediately typed up his memos of what Trump had said, only instead of acknowledging those were official FBI business, Comey sent those memos to his friend, to leak to the media. At this point, I don’t believe much that James Comey says. I think Comey lied… A LOT.
If you’re wondering how I skipped writing any blog posts about the Dems vicious smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh, well the truth is I’ve been pretty active on Twitter offering my opinions daily and since I still have to take care of my husband and get some chores done around the house, I didn’t have the time or energy to focus on writing blog posts too. Now that things seem to have settled down a bit, I’m going to try to get some blog posts written.
Hillary Clinton, our own Catherine de’ Medici, gave a very creepy interview to Christiane Amanpour, stating Democrats can’t be civil now, well just watch her eyes as she carefully enunciates every word.
Hillary is on the warpath.
Brett Kavanaugh worked for Ken Starr on the Clinton Impeachment investigation, so this was a very personal defeat for her.
All of the vicious, orchestrated media SPIN attacks on Kavanaugh by Dems looked like vintage Carville-type character assassination efforts from the Clinton machine. The Dems weren’t out just to stop Kavanaugh from being confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court; they wanted to destroy his life completely.
So, we’ve got Hillary on the warpath, while the truth behind the Steele dossier SPIN effort unravels more each week.
On October 4, 2018, the former top lawyer for the FBI, James Baker, testified to Congress that Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with Perkins Coie, approached him with documents and computer storage devices on Russian hacking and Russian election meddling.
Perkins Coie is the law firm that was reported to have hired and paid GPS Fusion, who in turn hired Steele to investigate Trump’s activities in Russia. Perkins Coie worked for the DNC and Hillary campaign:
“Sources familiar with Baker’s testimony to the House Judiciary and House Oversight & Government Reform Committees tell The Daily Caller News Foundation that he said Sussmann approached him for the meeting, which occurred in late summer or early fall 2016.
The meeting took place before the FBI submitted an application for its first FISA warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That warrant application, which was granted on Oct. 21, 2016, relied heavily on unverified allegations made in the report authored by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Steele had been hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016 to investigate Trump.
It is unclear exactly what information Sussmann, a former Justice Department prosecutor, provided to Baker and whether any of it related to the dossier. Sources tell TheDCNF that Baker testified that he did not read through the documents. He also testified that the meeting was atypical.
Sussmann, a former cybercrimes prosecutor, led the DNC’s effort to respond to Russian cyber attacks during the 2016 campaign. Sussmann helped hire CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that identified Russia as being behind the intrusion.”
So, this DNC/Clinton-connected lawyer, Michael Sussmann hand-delivered information to the top lawyer at the FBI before the Carter Page FISA warrant application and this same lawyer led the DNC’s efforts to respond to Russian cyber attacks during 2016 and helped hire CrowdStrike, rather than turn the DNC servers over to FBI investigators... I recall James Comey struggling for an explanation for why this happened. 1/10/17 report from The Hill:
“The FBI requested direct access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) hacked computer servers but was denied, Director James Comey told lawmakers on Tuesday.
The bureau made “multiple requests at different levels,” according to Comey, but ultimately struck an agreement with the DNC that a “highly respected private company” would get access and share what it found with investigators.
“We’d always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that’s possible,” Comey said, noting that he didn’t know why the DNC rebuffed the FBI’s request.”
The director was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a rare open session on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.”
Then when Trump won the election, Glenn Simpson met with Bruce Ohr and provided Ohr with every uncorroborated bit of dirt GPC Fusion and Christopher Steele developed. Reading this 8/9/18 piece by John Soloman, the Simpson/Steele allegations cover all the big news media Trump/Russian collusion “explosive reports”. It’s obvious Dem operatives were coordinating these SPIN media attacks against Trump to feed their #Resist effort, incite Trump and keep Republicans divided.
However, even more disturbing is all roads in the Trump/Russian collusion story lead back the Clinton campaign/Dem operatives. Even the touted former Russian intelligence officer cited in the Howard Blum Vanity Fair piece, according to Bruce Ohr’s notes, appears to have been in the US, not Moscow… John Soloman explains:
“Those are just some of the highlights from the day that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson — paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on her GOP rival — met secretly with a top Justice Department official, right after Trump won the 2016 election.
And all of it was captured in the official’s handwritten notes — a contemporaneous record that intelligence professionals tell me exposes the flaws plaguing the early Russia collusion case.
For example, Simpson told then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr during the Dec. 10, 2016, meeting in a Washington coffee shop that he believed Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, was the “go-between from Russia to the Trump campaign.”
Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. “Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.,” Ohr scribbled in his notes.”
The Soloman article is full of fascinating bits of information. So, the former Russian intelligence officer wasn’t in Moscow??? He was in the US and no one knows who he is??? The FBI didn’t try to figure this out immediately??? If you have some spare time, juxtapose these reports with the October 31, 2016, David Corn, Dem sleaze spinmeister, account:
My first grade picture from the mid 1960s. Note the chunk I took out of my bangs trying to cut my own hair and the dorky pin, part of a collection of costume jewelry my grandmother showered on my sisters and me (pssst, I still have some of those pins). At least the dress was in my all-time favorite color – pink. Yes, I have always loved PINK… Oh, as a historical note, back then girls had to wear skirts and dresses to public school in PA.
The past few weeks of the Kavanaugh drama got me thinking a lot about my feelings about the genesis of America TV and especially TV news in my lifetime (I’ll be 58 yrs old later this month).
My mother liked to tell this story about my internal clock as a very young child. She told me that I would go outside to play, often happily swinging on our swing set. Lacking anything remotely akin to a daring spirit, I do remember swinging for hours on end as a child. Swinging made me feel free of fear, almost like I could touch the sky. My mother liked to repeat this story that before I could tell time, I would always come inside from playing exactly on time to watch the TV shows and cartoons I liked. She said I would tell her that it was time for my show to start and she never figured out how I could be right on time, because I hadn’t even learned to tell time yet. Sadly, my adult life has never been one where I am right on time, because all too often I’ve been running late, a point of frequent conflict with my husband, who always liked to be early.
In recent years, with too much else on my mind, too many other things to do and most of all a total disgust for most TV offerings, I rarely turn the TV on. With the Kavanaugh drama, I did turn on cable TV a few times and then switched to C-Span coverage of the Senate happenings, which felt like old times for me. I used to be a dedicated C-Span viewer and a dedicated History Channel viewer… back when the History Channel actually ran programming on history.
And that brings me to the point, what in the heck happened to American TV???
Growing up in the era where we had three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, the shows of my childhood reflected traditional American values. Who could find fault with Lassie or Bonanza? My father also had, what I think was called a UHF antenna, before cable TV, and we picked up some country music shows, the Grand Ol Opry and some cartoons.
The TV news was in small segments throughout the day, not 24/7 and yet we still felt adequately informed, because along with TV news, newspapers were still considered a prime source of news for most Americans.
In the 70s and 80s American TV completely changed. The Phil Donahue type talk shows, with guests brought on to air their most intimate secrets or sensational topics, began to replace the old entertainment-focused interview shows. Donahue’s format was hailed as breaking new ground to get Americans to talk about controversial or uncomfortable personal topics. Oprah Winfrey expanded the Donahue model of tabloid talk TV shows in the 80s.
Since the late 90s, I’ve been on a soapbox about the damage to our culture the Oprahization of America has wrought. I remember a soapbox comment I posted on the Excite message boards in ’98 on this very topic, sadly being new to the internet, I didn’t even know how to save my posts back then, but suffice it to say, my opinion on tabloid TV has not changed at all. It’s a completely destructive force to encourage people to air their most personal problems, especially family problems on national TV. The tabloid TV craze encouraged people to go on national TV and BETRAY those closest to them, discussing personal and family problems in public, thus lighting a match to any vestiges of TRUST in their relationship. It is the most corrosive form of entertainment in America. Millions of Americans bought into it, wallow in, believe in it though, so the craze continued and advanced.
Reality TV formats grew from the tabloid TV shows, further plummeting American culture into a cesspool of trash TV. There has never been anything aspirational or positive about either tabloid TV or Reality TV.
With American news reporting, I got married in 1980 and my husband and I were both serving in the Army in Germany at the time. We didn’t even own a TV set in that first apartment in Germany. I listened to music on the radio or my cassette tapes. We came back to the States in 1981 and I became a homemaker, caring for our infant daughter, living in Fayetteville, NC, where my husband, served in the 82nd Airborne Division.
Times had changed in America and we had cable TV. For an avid TV watcher like me, it was like my prayers had been answered – 24 hour TV news with CNN, HBO, plus MTV, a channel dedicated to music delivered via highly creative videos. I could not praise Ted Turner enough for his ingenuity for CNN and 24 hour news. The only downside to so much more news was when some crisis happened, I became a non-stop channel-flipper, hoping that I might find more “breaking news” somewhere.
Grenada proved the most difficult, heart-wrenching few news days when President Reagan blocked media from the invasion and my husband was deployed there. My parents were on St. Thomas at the time and my mother kept calling me with the news she was getting there. Oddly enough, the only other truly anxious news void for me happened the day the OJ verdict came in and my sister was stationed in Turkey. There had been a news report of a major earthquake in Turkey and then it was 24/7 OJ coverage. Those were some long hours until my sister called and let us know she was safe.
Where TV is at now in 2018, after such promise in the 1980s, still shocks me. Sure Hollywood still manages to churn out a few excellent TV shows here or there, but the overall quality of TV offerings has declined, as has tabloid and reality TV formats, which only coarsen and sensationalize the worst aspects of American culture.
Sadly, beyond aggressively advancing the leftist social justice agenda, American TV offers little in the way of educational or quality historical information. It offers little in the way of promoting our literary and fine arts heritage. And it glaringly fails to offer even a glimmer of aspirational or unifying patriotic messages.
In recent years, I watch less and less TV, to the point that now I rarely even turn the TV on. My husband watches FOX News in the sun room, all day long, so I see small bits here and there (mostly ones I wish I had avoided since it’s blatant Trumpathon garbage).
I’ve awakened to the reality that American media, almost exclusively, dedicatedly promotes and works to mainstream the Left’s social justice dogma and indoctrinate Americans into Leftist groupthink and use of the American Left’s newspeak lingo – SPIN messaging.
I’ve also awakened to the reality that having American cable news reporting starkly divided along partisan political lines means none of us are getting straight, unbiased news reporting anymore.
“In the military, and in a military family, you learn to do something very hard and not of your own choosing, for a cause bigger than yourself. You’re working for a cause determined by the mechanisms of democracy, standing side by side with others who are fully committed. Current U.S. civilian life has a striking absence of “common causes”—tasks that remind us that there is more that unites us than divide us.”
I’ve had this link saved for over a week, intending to use it in a blog post, but really there’s not much I can add to this excellent piece written by Kathy Roth-Douquet.
I haven’t had the time or energy to put together a blog post lately, although I have been commenting about the Dem’s latest SPIN mass media crap show on Twitter some. Hopefully soon I’ll find time to get a blog post up.
A week or so ago I came across a Rand study, that I’ve begun reading and plan to finish when I have time. It’s called Truth Decay and sure feels like a timely topic: https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay.html
Since it’s Constitution Day, I’m going to meander away from our rancorous politics and go traipsing back to my childhood in the backwoods of northeast PA, plus a few other interesting locations in this blog post.
JK mentioned a book, Miracle at Philadelphia, he came across helping his mother move and decided to read. I added it to my Amazon wish list, but I have many books on the American Revolution and how The Constitution came about, including some very nice Library of America editions of the writings of Jefferson and Washington, a two-volume set of The Debate On The Constitution, a two-volume set on The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776, and a volume of Paine’s writings. I mention these very nice editions, because they’re kind of like real gem jewelry to me, who collects mostly used books and books other people were ready to trash. I love very nice books, but I have no problem collecting cast-offs
My book collecting habit developed early in life, when I eagerly began gathering discarded books from my family and neighbors, especially my oldest sister, who had friends with whom she shared paperbacks. I pretty much read whatever books I could get my hands on and books I signed out of my school library.
Some passions grow slowly and some are sparked by a specific event or person, I think. I can pinpoint exactly when and where my fascination with the history of early America and especially the Revolutionary War period started.
Growing up in a large, blue-collar family, we never went on any fancy summer vacations, but my parents did do a lot of same-day trips to see tourist sites in Philadelphia, other historical sites in PA, parks, some amusement parks and other “natural wonders” like Crystal Cave, and lest I forget a childhood favorite tourist location that had a great selection of cheap tourist trinkets… tada, Roadside America.
When my husband and I were visiting PA one time, in the early years of our marriage, I told him that you haven’t seen the greatness of PA until you see Roadside America, because it’s amazing. Let’s just say, he was less than impressed and he kept looking at me funny as I happily did the tour again and then insisted the experience wasn’t complete without spending an equal amount of time as the tour, pouring over the wide selection of gift shop “treasures”.
I learned early on, that my husband does not have any tourist DNA in his body and he lacks any sensibility to appreciate the joy of collecting cheap tourist mementos. He used to love amusement parks though. Alas, fast rides scare the bejesus out of me and amusement parks attract large, loud crowds, another thing I assiduously try to avoid. Museums, historical sites and peaceful gardens, on the other hand, assuredly are the most delightful tourist locations, right?
PA has many important and truly fascinating historical sites. To see Gettysburg really takes a few days of sightseeing, likewise Philadelphia, plus there’s that whole western side of the state too.
My one son and I were discussing traveling and what types of places rank high on our tourist wish list over the weekend. He mentioned that he enjoyed touring historic Philadelphia and seeing the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, but he’s not one to get all excited looking at stuff like a chair, where the tour guide reverently tells you, “George Washington sat here.” And, therein lies the difference between us.
So, you might think the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall or perhaps even The Betsy Ross House provided that spark that grew into my lifelong passion.
You’d be wrong.
When I was 12 years old, one of my sisters and I went with our Girl Scout troop on a big trip for a few days. Our troop raised money for the trip, which made it feel even more momentous. Nothing prepared me for that stepping back in time feeling of Colonial Williamsburg, VA. I still have my 1973 Official Guidebook and Map (50 cents):
Colonial Williamsburg spoke to my young heart in a special way. Every person in colonial costume explaining something about life in pre-revolutionary America held me enthralled. Then we toured the House of Burgesses and a female tour guide explained that Thomas Jefferson stood at the half-open door to listen to Patrick Henry’s fiery speech denouncing the Stamp Act, a wildly unpopular direct tax imposed by the crown on American colonists. Standing in that room, I felt almost transported back in time.
When it came time to leave, I yearned to be able to stay in Colonial Williamsburg forever, but alas, I had to settle for my official guidebook and, of course, some souvenirs from the gift shop. My prize souvenirs were a cheap, black felt tricorn hat and a large white feather quill pen. When I got home I cut two small holes in the back of my hat and inserted the feather at a jaunty angle. And yes, I often sat at my desk in my bedroom wearing my tricorn hat, reading about early American history and The Constitution, despite my sister, with whom I shared a bedroom, mocking me and my “stupid” hat.
The Williamsburg trip was where it began. Then I was blessed with an amazing 7th grade U.S. history teacher, who inspired my love of studying The Constitution. A few years later, it was 1976 in America and everywhere I turned Bicentennial books and merchandise fed my passion.
1976 was a really great year for falling totally in love… with American history.
libertybelle diaries 