We lived so well so long

The melody of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” is based on the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”. You may also recognize it as something that appears in J.S. Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion. Simon wrote it just after the election of Richard M. Nixon.

Both the music and the lyrics speak to me in this summer of dread and unrest, so that’s what we’re having today. That line "I'm just weary to my bones" describes me most days.

We’ve got the fear and uncertainty, the utter weariness at the constant firehose blast of fuckery, the confusion and abuse. But—as he points out—we can’t expect to be bright and bon vivant all the time. And if we can’t be forever blessed, we can get up on the working days and get after it.

Here’s Simon singing it in 1974. Have a listen and then listen again.

©2024 Bas Bleu

Once & future king?

Well, huh—Independence Day, commemorating the 13 colonies along the Atlantic seaboard driving a stake in the ground and proclaiming we were done with monarchs. That was in 1776; it took seven years of warfare and a huge boost from the French to make good on that bold declaration, but it held for 248 years—with that little blip between 1861 and 1865.

However, SCOTUS has ruled that presidents whose surnames begin with T and end in P are, in effect, above the law, and immune from prosecution for “official acts”. They’re open to including breaches of national security, incitement to insurrection, impeding the peaceful transfer of power and unparalleled corruption as “official acts”.

Again, if you have that magic surname. All others need not apply.

So I’m not feeling like celebrating today.

Instead I’m watching the expected Tory bloodbath in today’s election in Britain, as their economic and social “policies” finally come home to roost. With any luck, Nigel Farage will take an electoral as well as literal milkshaking, although he’s running in Clacton, so he has a chance of finally getting to Westminster.

I’m also seeking out beauty, no matter how small.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

The turning tide

The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. And we shall have to see how Monday's SCOTUS rulings cause more damage than 9/11. July seems to attract cataclysms.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. Not this time. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

The best that money can buy

Here’s all I have to say about the rulings handed down in the past few days by the most corrupt SCOTUS in our history:

No justice, no peace.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Good neighbors

Gratitude Monday—and it’s Canada Day. So I’m thinking about how great the Canadians are, individually and collectively.

I could get silly and talk about Leslie Nielsen or one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Due South. But I’ve already done that.

And Canadians are way more than wacky comedians and upright Mounties in a cynical American city. They’re even more than mail-order pharmacies and refuges for cabernet-toting discontents fleeing whichever administration gets into office down here.

They are pretty much in every way the kind of neighbor you’d like to have on your street. They don’t throw loud parties, or park huge SUVs in their driveway, or toss their clapped-out washing machines in their weed-infested front yard.

They quietly go about their lives as conscientious citizens of the world, picking up the trash they find (and disposing of it responsibly) and pitching in whenever asked to help set the worst things to rights. They define the term “stand-up guys”.

Two things in particular I’m thinking about:

Teheran, 1979. In the midst of the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah, six American diplomats were given shelter in the Canadian embassy for 79 days, until they could be extracted by a joint Canadian-CIA mission. It was an act of both neighborly kindness and extreme courage for the Canadians to hide the Americans, especially at a time when it was clear that “diplomatic courtesies” didn’t rate high on the Iranian revolutionary priority list.

The Canadians risked personal safety and national policy to help out six Americans, who’d probably been trash-talking hockey teams right up until the embassy takeover. They didn’t hesitate and they didn’t flinch.

My second example of Canadian rectitude is Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire. Dallaire had just about the worst job of the 1990s: Force Commander of United Nations Assistance Mission Rwanda (UNAMIR), from 1993 to 1996. During the worst genocide of the second half of the 20^th Century, Dallaire commanded forces without resources, with limited remit and  no backing from his political masters. I cannot believe the fortitude of a man who still managed to save thousands of the people under his care.

Although at a terrible, terrible cost. Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle told the story much better than I could, so I’ll let him do it. It was an impossible command, an impossible remit and an impossible expectation. But Dallaire took it on.

I can just picture most American generals after that posting—speaking engagements, management consulting, appearances on talk shows. Dallaire went back to Canada, where PTSD led him to a suicide attempt. His big public outing has been to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who was subsequently convicted of war crimes. He also advocated for children affected by war—something he’s an expert in.

I cannot express my admiration for the country that produced people like this. You don’t think of them a lot, because good neighbors don’t get in your face. But you’re always really, really glad they’re there.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

 

Talking backwards

At time of writing, we’re still a couple of hours from the presidential debate. Which means we’ve had about ten days of Republicans laying the groundwork for a catastrophic failure by their twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist and fraudster, cognitively impaired, convicted felon candidate. They’ve been doing that by confidently proclaiming that Biden will be jacked up on everything from vitamin supplements through crack, washed down by Mountain Dew.

You really can’t make this shit up, folks, because Republicans do that for you.

Anyway, I thought that I should adhere to this theme and give you something from the better-living-through-chemistry years. So, here’s Jefferson Airplane and “White Rabbit”.

(Just so you know—I spent the afternoon rolling down memory lane on this one, because the choices, man—the choices…)

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Lighting up

As I reported recently, I’ve had to finally Do Something about my kitchen lighting. I just couldn’t stand that harsh light in the single fixture.

So on Tuesday the electrician—Jeff Littlejohn from JML Electric; if you’re in NoVa, he’s the man for you—came out. In less than 90 minutes he installed three flush-mounted recessed lights. When he flipped the switch, my ratty old kitchen looked like a showroom. It was amazing.

You cannot believe what a difference those three lights make. No shadows on the counter wherever I’m working. It looks…positive.

(On the downside, I can see every single place where I missed something when wiping down the counters. This is going to end up with more work for me.)

I’m going to think about a dimmer; I think I need to live with this brightness for a while. But I’m so happy I finally got this one ticked off my 2017 move-in list.

And yes: I'll finally have to call a guy to patch and paint over all the holes in the ceiling.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Another shot at it

I had an appendectomy the summer I was 27. It was the first time I’d ever experienced a procedure that impeded my mobility. Post-op, I could walk around—carefully—but I was deeply aware that any sudden movement or extra stretch could bring pain.

One incident stands out in my mind: Through connections at the newspaper I worked for, I got permission to do some research in the textiles facility of the LA County Museum of Art. To get there, I had to take an elevator up three floors. Just as the doors were closing, two teenaged boys jumped in with me. And I felt anxiety because I knew I didn’t have full range of motion; I couldn’t defend myself, I couldn’t run. “This is what old age will be like,” I thought.

They got off on the second floor and I went on up to the textiles department to do my research.

I’ve been reminded of that in the past couple of weeks because of the pain in my lumbar region. It affects my ability to reach, to bend, to carry heavy things, sometimes even to walk. I know I walk hunched over, because the muscle spasms have extended up my back on the left side. It’s also arbitrary—sometimes a particular action will trigger agony; other times I’m fine. But I live in fear that it will strike, and that makes me furious, that fear.

The orthopod three weeks ago diagnosed it as bursitis brought on by chronic tendonitis, but Monday when I saw the physical therapist (you can get scheduled for surgery faster than a PT practice can slot you in for treatment) he diagnosed something that feels more precise: the left sacroiliac joint is looser than the one on the right. As a consequence, that ilium is lower, and my left leg seems longer, which affects my gait. He reached this conclusion after asking a lot of questions about my symptoms and probing the affected areas. (The orthopedic surgeon spent about three minutes looking at the X-rays, which did not include anything above the ilio-femoral joint.)

This feels more in line with the pain I’ve been experiencing, so I’m feeling more hopeful about recovery. For some time I’d been carrying the burden of “this is what my life will be like, hunched over in pain, just like I pictured it in the elevator of LACMA, and I don't like it” and it may be that this isn’t, in fact the case.

Now it’s a question of doing the exercises—carefully; nothing that puts all my weight on the left leg—and being aware.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Parental controls

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which device screens have taken over humanity here in the People’s Republic. During the pandemic, I used to look out my front window and see people walking their dogs, their kids (in strollers or not) or alone and be completely oblivious to the world around them because their heads were bent, eyes focused on their little screens.

(This is the logical extension of what I saw 15 years ago in the Seattle Arboretum: two guys walking through spectacular nature (if you like rhododendrons), each listening to his own earbuds. Just physical proximity, no acknowledgement of each other or their surroundings.)

I still see it when I’m out on walks (when they’re not carrying on conversations with their phones on speaker). And I don’t get it—what is the point of being outside if you are not, in fact, being outside?

Well, yesterday I may have hit peak device dementia. Viz:

I wonder how that kid is going to turn out in 18 years?

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: keeping cool

We here in the environs of the District They Call Columbia are part of the extended heat wave that’s covering a good chunk of the eastern half of the United States. Heat index for most of last week was well into the upper 90s; Saturday we had triple-digit temperatures. For my morning walks, temps have hovered around 80F.

Saturday evening around 1900 I opened the patio door to toss out some pizza bones for Foxy and the heat sucked the air right out of me. Google told me it was 93F.

Listen—when it’s so hot that squirrels sploot on the shaded concrete, it’s bad.

(I’m not going to go into global warming, but c’mon, people—how much evidence do you need when all over the world, including both northern and southern hemispheres, temperatures are abnormally high for prolonged periods of time?)

So today I am so grateful that I have working air conditioning in my house, and ceiling fans in the bedrooms upstairs, where it’s noticeably warmer than downstairs. Because of this, I do not sploot.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu