Tuesday

                           Musings and History

Quote of the day:

When speaking of Neville Chamberlain he said:

“I cannot support any person that thinks charisma is December 25^th.”

                                             Winston Churchill

Two things:
One: There is much ado about civilians being killed or injured as a result of collateral damage during an attack on armed insurgents. Just 73 years ago the US and the allies began an systematic bombing of German and Japanese cities that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. This came after the Germans indiscriminately bombed English, French, Scandinavian, Dutch, Belgian and several other nation's cities killing civilians with the idea of breaking their spirit. The Japanese went into Nanking, China and killed and raped over 300,000 civilians one at a time and is known to this day as “The Rape Of Nanking”. Is it OK for our enemies to kill civilians with hope of breaking our spirit but we cannot respond in kind? Read history folks.

Two: During the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage Rome was not very successful against Hannibal in battlefields in Italy so they took another tack. They sailed over to Hannibal's hometown of Carthage and killed everything, not everybody, everything and either burned or destroyed all structures. They were not done yet, they salted the ground to where nothing would grow and that was the end of Carthage and eventually Hannibal's supply source. The point I am making is that you have to be meaner and more vicious that your adversary...if not you will be fighting to a stalemate at every encounter. The result is a war of attrition that no one wins...see Vietnam. That war could have been won easily with the total destruction of Hanoi and Haiphong, but LBJ was afraid of the bad press and the end result was 58,201 Americans died for nothing. We are doing the same thing in Afghanistan. It should be total war or not at all.

          This Date in History   September 12

1912 Two automobile enthusiasts try to gather enough money together to build a transcontinental road from New York to San Francisco. They came up with $10 million in private funds but needed a little more so they approached Henry Ford and that jackass refused to contribute so they went to the president of Packard and he delivered $1.7 million and suggested that they name it the Lincoln Memorial Highway to make it eligible for federal funds. And sure enough they did and enough funds were found and the construction was started. This road later became the famous Route 66.

1992 Actor Anthony Perkins died of AIDS. I guess Tony’s most memorable performance was as Norman Bates in the horror thriller Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Friendly Persuasion but he was severely miscast as the baseball star Jim Pearsall in the movie Fear Strikes Out where Pearsall was pushed relentlessly by his father to become a major league baseball player. Pearsall finally did get to the major leagues but was crazy as a bedbug because of the pressure his father had put on him. Anthony Perkins obviously was no athlete and it was apparent when you saw him swing a bat or throw a ball, I felt embarrassed for him. His ways and demeanor were very effeminate. Anthony finished out his career capitalizing on his Norman Bates thing with 5 or 6 sequels to Psycho.

1861 CSA Gen. Sterling Price captured Lexington, Missouri after a nine day siege. Price had surrounded the town and cut off the water supply and just waited and therefore there were almost no casualties. Price was the CSA commander at the Battle of Wilson Creek a month before where the US army got the crap kicked out of it and its forces were scattered to the four winds.

1968 Ford and Nissan decide to create a minivan specifically aimed at the gutless, spineless, yuppie, PW’ed husbands that may be out there in suburbia. It was an immediate success because there are apparently more of the above described men than anyone had ever dreamed. What makes me say this is once I was working in a men’s clothing store and a man and his wife and two kids came in the store. The man was responsible for keeping the kids corralled while the wife went through the clothing picking out stuff for him. After all is said and done and they start to leave, I cannot resist so I took a very bold teal colored tie to the man and suggest that this is the hot color this year for the “strong minded executives.” It really wasn’t but I just wanted to stir up some shit and the man went to the front door and yells at his wife, who is already sitting in the driver's seat of a Ford Windstar, “Honey, can I get this tie?” She said “Not this time.” I asked him what he did and said he was a financial planner. This man is suppose to make decisions on people's financial futures and can’t make a personal decision on a tie? I don’t think so. I had forgotten how spineless the American male had become, this reminded me. On the other hand an elderly gentleman came in with his wife and said “We are from Tryon and I need a suit to go to a funeral so I need to have the alterations done today if any.” I took a few measurements and led him over to a suit rack to make a selection. I suggested a navy blue or charcoal gray...then his wife jumped in and started pulling suits off the rack telling him what he should get. Soon thereafter he said to her “You need to go wait in the car”...that wasn't good either. I found a suit that fitted him well except the pants needed to be hemmed. I did that myself and sent him...and his wife...on their way back to Tryon.

1977 Steve Biko, a black activist against apartheid in South Africa, dies of head trauma in Pretoria. Biko had been a thorn in the side of white South Africa for some years trying to make the country democratic with equal treatment for all. He was arrested en route to a political rally in Port Elizabeth and taken to a prison that was notorious for torture and killing. That’s right folks, like it or not our Caucasian brethren used Nazi tactics to keep the blacks suppressed. During his 18 day stay he obviously was severely beaten because when they brought his out he was comatose but they offered no medical treatment and put him in the back of a van and drove him over 700 miles to Pretoria, hung him by his wrist from a window frame where he died. Even though former guards have testified that they grabbed Steve by the arms, bent him over and ran him headlong into a stone wall no one was ever sentenced for this outrage. But later on apartheid was abolished and a black man named Nelson Mandela was elected president. Maybe this atones for Steve Biko’s torture and death, maybe. As all of us know, there are martyrs in every search for justice and freedom, history is full of them and now Steve Biko’s name has been added.

Born today:

1880 US writer H.L. Mencken. He said “Everyone should respect other’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” Mencken was a famous atheist.

1888 French actor Maurice Chevalier. He said “Old age is not so bad, considering the alternative.” Good thinking there, Maurice.

1917 Chinese writer Han Suyin. He said “The most powerful force in the world is gentleness.” Han, that is a hard pill to swallow when speaking of those rat shit Arab terrorists.

               Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow