My old ViewSonic monitor started acting up a while ago. It wouldn’t reliably wake from sleep, and sometimes I had to turn it on and off a half dozen times to get it to work more or less reliably.
A consultation with good old Mr. Google found that monitors from a wide variety of outfits have been getting sideways due to bum capacitors. A competent electronics type probably could have cracked the case and fixed it himself, but we’re talking about me here.
So, rather than bundle up and camp outside the Best Buy in hopes of knuckle-dusting my way to a new one at a door-busting, unbelievable, rock-bottom, low, low price, I hauled the old one over to Voelker Research and had it fixed.
Radio Free Dogpatch first “aired” in November 2005, then promptly swirled down the Loo of History. It’s back now, God help us all.
Herself and I have been enjoying a spirited round of “Spin the Pickle” with the pirates at Anthem Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a Borg-like amalgamation of drones, robots and faceless voices that has shown a distinct lack of interest in paying our dental claims, though we notice it cashes the premium checks with no lack of alacrity.
We’ve had three valid claims denied this year — one for Herself, two for me — and generally by the time we jack-hammer the last one through the series of wormholes they jovially call their “customer service” system, it’s time for the next appointment. Makes a fella really glad that his dentist isn’t the dude from “Marathon Man.”
So, since (a) it’s too cold for a ride, (2) I’m sick of harassing the fuckers via phone, email and Twitter, and (c) I would rather do just about anything other than ride the stationary trainer, it seemed a fine day for potting up the volume over at Radio Free Dogpatch.
Nov. 22, 1963, may have been the day when I first realized that all was not as it seemed.
I was sitting in front of my fifth-grade class at Randolph AFB outside San Antonio, reading aloud to the other kids (yes, even at age 9 I had the mellifluous speaking voice we have all come to know and love), when The Authorities announced via loudspeaker that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
That was it for school. Stunned, confused, we trudged home and, with the rest of the world, watched on TV as the young president was buried and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in to replace him.
Yeah, right. Replace Jack Kennedy. Like that could ever happen.
Forget everything you’ve learned about him since. For a 9-year-old Irish-American, JFK was as good as it got. Like my old man, he’d been in the war; like me, JFK was a swimmer. “PT 109” sailed well ahead of “The Ten Commandments” in my personal mythology, and “Profiles in Courage” may have been the first work of non-fiction that I ever read.
JFK wasn’t some baldheaded old warhorse like President Eisenhower, or a sweaty, shifty-eyed rodent like Richard M. Nixon — he was young, and brash, and when he went eyeball to eyeball with the Commies, guess who blinked first? Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, that’s who. Made it a little easier to crouch under the desk during duck-and-cover drills, knowing that Jack had our back.
Then, in a wink of an eye, he was dead. Gone. And some jug-eared Texican was calling himself the president. LBJ used Randolph as a landing strip whenever he had a hankerin’ to visit the ranch, and we went to see him a time or two, but it felt like bullshit to me. This guy was the president? Says fuckin’ who?
In the October-November issue of AARP The Magazine, Bob Schieffer recalls covering the assassination as night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He likens the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy to a key scene in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Remember how the movie started out in black-and-white, and then Dorothy opens her front door into this vibrant Technicolor? That’s how I think of the Kennedy administration. He brought style and grace, and inspired a generation to do something for their country.
I’ll carry that a step further. The assassination of John F. Kennedy revealed to some of us, for the first time, that there is a man behind the curtain, a shadowy, furtive figure that warrants our close and undivided attention, no matter what the Wizard says up front.
And while the Wizard loves to work his magic in rich, warm colors, the world often shows itself to us most truly in stark black and white.
• Editor’s note: As you might expect, Charles P. Pierce has some thoughts on this subject, too.
I neglected to post something yesterday about Veterans Day, thinking I didn’t have anything fresh to say, and finding the outpouring of social-media thank-yous to the military slightly irksome. I never served, but if I had, I expect I might not enjoy being pandered to any better than I would being ignored.
Like Charles P. Pierce, when I was a squirt I didn’t know anyone whose father was not a veteran. Since the old man was career Air Force, we mostly knew the kids of Blue Zoomies, but in the course of affairs we would meet others; sons and daughters of soldiers, sailors, Marines.
We’d hear the tales secondhand (none of the dads I knew bragged to kids about his service, so the kids bragged for them). This one was at Omaha Beach, that one at the Battle of the Bulge; this one got shot down in a B-29 after bombing Tokyo, that one flew unarmed Gooney Birds out of New Guinea.
It all sounded really cool, especially while consuming a steady diet of war movies at the base theater, like “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen,” or “PT 109.” And then we got a little older, and a little smarter, and we came to realize that going to war involved a strong probability of getting one’s arse shot off.
We realized that we never got to hear kids tell about their dads who didn’t make it back, because those kids died unborn with their would-be fathers, figments of an unrealized imagination. And we didn’t get to hear about the men who returned from war damaged in body, mind or spirit, or meet them; not until our own war, Vietnam, came along.
Books like “All Quiet on the Western Front” took on new meaning. And there were others, like “Dispatches,” by Michael Herr; “A Rumor of War,” by Philip Caputo; and “Everything We Had,” by Al Santoli.
In “Narrow Road to the Interior,” Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), following a visit to the ruins of Yasushira — and riffing off a line from the Chinese master Tu Fu about how war had left “the whole country devastated,” a place where “only mountains and rivers remain” — wrote:
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams
In “The Poetry of Zen,” co-author Sam Hamill calls this poem “a brilliant indictment of the stupidity and cruelty of war,” one that reminds us how little we have learned over the millennia. How does one say “Thank you for your service” to the grass?
By seeing to it that subsequent generations get to spend as much time as is humanly possible enjoying the sunny side of it, I suppose.
Peace to those to served, and especially to those who never came home.
One toddler pirate was into some serious pillaging, plucking booty from our candy bowl with both teensy fists. An adult joked, “I hope you’re planning to share that. …” Goddamn socialists. When I was a child, we had to make our own Halloween candy and then defend it by force of arms.
With this satanic celebration safely behind us now, it’s time for the sanctified seasonal festivities, like scrambling to find nifty places to stash the poor folks where holiday shoppers won’t have to look at ’em.
A beater South Nevada motel that has housed some 70 folks is closing, apparently to reopen in 2014 as “a center for mothers undergoing substance abuse treatment,” a need for which the necessary $300,000 per annum to house an estimated 20 moms and their kids has yet to materialize.
In the meantime, the Springs Rescue Mission will operate the city’s only overnight shelter for the chronically homeless throughout the winter, providing 30 beds for men and women. That has funding through April 15, but the mission apparently has plans to use the space for “an undetermined purpose” come springtime.
I bet springtime seems a long way off to a lot of these folks. The Baboon Caucus would like to ensure that it never comes. Not for the homeless. Anyone who doesn’t own at least three houses, a bank account in the Caymans and a senator is invisible to that crowd.
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