Because they bring a measure of unselfconscious joy and beauty into the world…and we can’t be having that.
I’ve written before about how many years ago Montgomery County allowed you to go read your school records…basically everything your teachers wrote about you for the other teachers and administrators to see. So I went and looked and there wasn’t much there I didn’t expect to see. But what did tickle me was my first grade teacher who Did Not like me or mom one little bit wrote that little Bruce “takes excessive interest in personal art projects.“
I had two art teachers who got me, and they encouraged me and that really helped a lot. But some teachers when they see the slightest hint of artistic interest have some sort of allergic reaction and do their damnedest to kill it in a kid. I suppose so they don’t have to see how stone cold and dead their soul is.
The title of this post is a quote of Frank Lloyd Wright’s that I particularly like. You find it really applies to a lot of political and religious movements. The Southern Baptists being one I’m most familiar with, having grown up in a Baptist (Yankee) household. But once upon a time I had one of those adolescent flings with something I’d become convinced held the answer to, well, Everything.
You hear the word spoken a lot in certain circles: Libertarian. This Salon article is worth a read about that…
Libertarianism “is a Frankenstein’s monster” that got its power from resistance to the Civil Rights Movement…
From the article…
In 2014 poll, Pew Research found that 14 percent of Americans said they identified as libertarians, but only 11 percent identified as libertarians and correctly identified what the term means, that is, “someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government.”
Even among this group, though, “true” libertarians seem hard to find…
Like looking for genuine collectible coins in a Franklin Mint store.
I considered myself a libertarian back in the late ‘70s. I worked the petition drives to get candidates on the ballot. I went to meetings. I subscribed to all the periodicals…Inquiry…Reason…Libertarian Review. And I can tell you that the number of people who say they’re libertarian is much Much larger than the number of people who actually are. Also, that a lot of John Birchers glommed onto it as a way to advocate the dismantling of minority rights without looking like a bunch of angry old racists.
It was Reagan giving me a taste of what a libertarian society would really look like, and seeing how many of my fellow libertarians were more about states rights than individual rights (there was much joy in the ranks when the Supreme Court upheld the sodomy laws) that opened my eyes to what the party was really about, and that idealistic kids like me were just their useful tools, that drove me out. DeLong has it absolutely right here. I was there. I saw it.
In the fury to come about the Rittenhouse verdict, and how it gives right wing terrorists license to hunt and kill people protesting racist police violence, spare a moment of thought about the reporters covering those protests.
We have seen since Ferguson how the police actively target reporters on the scene. It got to the point during that unrest, that police would suddenly charge a protest line and drag away a specific person their intelligence thought was an activist leader. They would also arrest and detain news camera crews and reporters. Over time since Ferguson, it escalated to shootings of reporters and video crew with rubber bullets which were later justified as “confusion” as to whether the camera was a gun or not.
We have seen over and over how police shootings often end up being justified by the cop saying they thought the person they shot had a gun in their hands. “I thought it was a gun”. But it turned out to just be a wallet or a cell phone.
I thought it was a gun. Now add armed right wing civilians into the mix, lax to non-existent local firearms regulations, and local police affinity with right wing terror groups. The protests that night in Kenosha were about the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake, yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man…in the back three times, and in the side twice…and clearly the Kenosha police that night appreciated the company of that squad of white militia. In fact, as the ACLU reports, they herded the protestors toward them…
“His acquittal comes after our investigation exposed how Kenosha law enforcement used violence against protesters and drove them toward white militia groups, in ways that escalated tensions and almost certainly led to these shootings…”
The white militia were on the side of the police. Against the protestors. Who were there to protest the police shooting, in the back, of an unarmed black man.
I used to go to every news event in DC with my cameras, wander among the crowds and document what was happening. Sometimes I got my photography into a local newspaper. More often it was just to capture the history I was living through for myself. I have quite an archive now of that history. I’ve put some of it up on my website.
But lately I’ve been more hesitant to do that then I ever was, even during the worst of the riots of the 70s. Partly it’s age. My legs just don’t hold up as long as they used to. Partly it’s opportunity. The job I have doesn’t always keep regular business hours. But mostly now, right now, it is this: It’s going to be very easy going forward, for some armed right wing thug to shoot dead anyone with a camera and claim, even laughingly, that it was self defense. They will absolutely do that to commercial news reporters. Street photographers will absolutely be targets too. In Ferguson they were merely arrested and held in jail for doing their jobs. Now they can be shot. Not by the police, but by friendly white militia.
I thought it was a gun…I thought it was a gun…I thought it was a gun…hahahahaha…I thought it was a gun…
The English word yodel is derived from the German (and originally Austro-Bavarian) word jodeln, meaning “to utter the syllable jo” (pronounced “yo” in English). Most experts agree that yodeling was used in the Central Alps by herders calling their stock or to communicate between Alpine villages. The multi-pitched “yelling” later became part of the region’s traditional lore and musical expression. The earliest record of a yodel is in 1545, where it is described as “the call of a cowherd from Appenzell”
There’s a scene in the 2004 movie Summer Storm (I’m recalling it just now from memory…) where boys from a Bavarian rowing team are lounging on a beach and they see a girl’s team at practice rowing past. One of them playfully yodels out to them and one of the other boys disgustedly says, Oh great, now everyone knows we’re Bavarians. Later I worked up the nerve to ask a certain someone if it was true that Bavarians were considered country bumpkins in Germany. He assured me it was true.
This came across my Facebook stream the other day…
Time was, if I saw this cartoon I’d spend a few days pondering if I should show it to him or not. Would he share a laugh with me, or would he think I was making fun of him. Now I just regret that I never did ask him to yodel. I should have asked him to yodel.
Earlier today at the Fitness Center…working out on the arm bike machine…imagining a movie where the James Mason Captain Nemo joins forces with the Vincent Price Robur to wage war on slavers all over the world, sinking their ships at sea (before they can take on slaves) and pummeling their soldiers on land.
Facebook helpfully provides a daily Things That You Posted On This Date Through The Years link…
This is about the premiere of Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. It’s about the protests over teenagers being forced into ex-gay conversion therapy at a place in Memphis Tennessee. I contributed both photography for it and some money, so I got screen credits for Photography and as an Associate Producer.
I’m sixty-eight years old now, and on the cusp of retirement, and I see this and I’m thinking, wow…it’s been a life hasn’t it Bruce Garrett…
Cartoonist, photographer, software engineer, woodworker, roadie for a local blues band, architectural model maker, burger flipper, stock clerk in a psychiatric hospital, JWST ground systems test conductor, associate producer…
I can remember looking out across the Washington DC rail yards and seeing steam engines. I remember when most of the passenger airplanes I saw overhead were propeller driven. I saw the beginnings of the jet age, then the space age. I listened to short wave radio so I could get the news from abroad. I remember the weird sounds of the Soviet Union jammers trying to keep Radio Free Europe out. I remember the transition to color TV. I watched the first satellite TV broadcast from overseas. I watched live as Neil Armstrong put his foot on the moon. I remember the transition to wireless telephones, then to cell phones. I was among the first generation of 18 year olds to cast a vote in a presidential election. I registered for the draft when I turned 18, went for my pre-induction physical when I got the notice, stood in a line with a bunch of other 18 year olds in our underwear as we were poked and prodded by military doctors for suitability as Vietnam war canon fodder. I did my own maintenance on my first car, changing spark plugs, adjusting the distributor points, and checking the timing with a timing light. I remember the first gasoline drought and why it mattered if your license tag ended in an even or odd number. I built my first computer from parts I got at a HAM fest and taught myself how to program it. I walked in the first national Gay Rights march. I walked grieving and terrified among the Names Project quilt panels. I have stood in a protest line across from a camp that forced gay teenagers into ex-gay therapy, talked with the survivors young and old. I have spoken test instructions across the NASA deep space network, talked to astronauts that serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. I have a piece of it they brought back on my den wall.
It’s a small thing I suppose, but my handwritten signature has been into space three times, carried on an Institute banner during Hubble servicing missions. A little piece of me made it into space.
Yeah. It’s been a life.
Someone who joined a Zoom happy hour I hit every now and then said I should write a memoir, but it would be exhausting to do and probably very confusing for anyone to read. What is your point Mr. Garrett?? I dunno…shit happens I guess…
Ah yes…1971…a year to remember. Even more so than the following year when I graduated.
In 1971 Canon of Japan began making the Canon F-1. Up to then it was the Nikon F that was the iconic pro 35mm SLR camera. But it was a late 1950s design that was only by virtue of the camera body’s bombproof build quality and the ability to stay current with new attachments, like a Kirby vacuum, that enable it to stay on top. I was dissatisfied, too much of it seemed to be retrofitted and not organic to its design. Nowadays I’d call it a kludge camera, but I have more respect for it because it really was (apart from the photomic metering prisms) a workhorse, and I even own one myself now. When I saw the first ads for the Canon F-1 in the photography magazines they hit me like a lightning bolt. Everything about it was state of the art and completely organic to its design. And it was a beautiful camera. I knew instantly, that was My Camera. But it was expensive, and hard to find in the states for a long long time. That summer break I worked my first W2 job in the kitchen of a fast food joint making a tad over that minimum wage. That, plus selling my Miranda Sensorex allowed me to buy an F-1 in time for my senior year of high school.
When I got it home and unboxed it and held it in my hands for the first time I knew I had My Camera. I still have it.
In 1971 my cartoons would see print for the first time in the student newspaper. Later I would also become its photographer. For the first time in my life my artistic talents were being appreciated and nurtured (my first grade teacher wrote in my school record that I took “excessive interest in personal art projects”). The bullying and low expectations of my early childhood began to slough away. I began to really believe in myself. It was different from believing that I believed in myself. I could see a future for a kid like me. Maybe.
The summer of 1971 was when I got my driver’s license. Mom would let me drive her car, a basic 1968 Plymouth Valiant, and I began my love affair with the open road. But another love affair was percolating in my teenage hormones.
The year would end with me finally coming out to myself December 15. First love. It was wonderful, I was completely twitterpated. It changed everything.
And couldn’t tell anyone. 1971 was not the time for a gay teenager to be out about it.
The One Thing A Thief Hates Being Called Is A Thief
This came across my Facebook stream today…
The text post enlightened me on details I hadn’t heard regarding the kook pew complaints over CRT, especially the black-supremacist angle. That was a new one to me and it tweaked my interest. This gay man endured decades of seeing our struggle for equality labeled as us wanting “special rights”…in other words, more rights than everyone else. But really the complaint was we wanted more rights than bigots thought we deserved.
It’s really stunning in its way, how equal rights, equal opportunity, equal justice, gets its most venomous pushback from exactly the direction you would, in retrospect, have expected. But there is always a learning curve.
There are those of us who grew up in the culture and simply didn’t question it because it all seemed to perfectly normal. We were born to it. It was our daily lives. But then we began to see the foundations of that normalcy and it shocked us, and it called to our moral sensibilities, the very things we were raised to, all those days in the church pews, all those hours listening to the morality plays of our youth, and we began to work for change, not because we felt guilty, but because we felt a moral obligation once we could see the problem, to fix it. It was simply how we were raised. It’s what you do.
But there were others who seemed to know intuitively that They Were The Problem, and you saw it in how outraged they became at even discussing the problem, and how furiously they denied there even was a problem.
If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, it’s not the mirror’s fault. And I am not so much woke, as still that little Baptist boy sitting in the pews who was told that as you sow, so shall you reap, and though I am an atheist now, I still see the truth of that.
I Know…Let’s Spend A Fortune On Disney World Tickets And Just Stand In Line For Hours!
What fun!
Scanning my Facebook stream this morning I see complaining about the lines at the new Space 220 restaurant at Walt Disney World. One user posted that they’d waited in line with family for three hours, only to be told the bar was open now and so kids could not be allowed inside.
Three hours. Anyone who has ever hung out with me knows how impatient I can get about lines, but I am stunned. Who stands in a line for three hours to eat?? For a ride…maybe. If it’s new and exciting. Sure. But…to eat? How about making a reservation? And if you try and discover it’s booked for three months in advance, maybe think of another place to eat that day.
I dunno…I’ve always been this way. Ask anyone who’s ever stood in line with me. But maybe more so now that I’m at the tail end of life and about to retire and my days will be all mine and I’m not spending the hours of those last days standing in lines doing nothing. At my age I’m napping too much as it is.
You don’t need to stand in line. Especially for three hours. Are you insane? There are Tons of good places to eat. There are lots of fun rides and attractions. Yeah…yeah…but none of them are the Next Big Thing. I get it. But I don’t. Life is short. Impatience is a virtue.
This came across my Facebook stream a moment ago, and I just have to share
From Mikhail Voloshin (Facebook):
I just want to take a moment to gaze in awe at that cat’s face. If one were to try to imagine the hardest, saltiest, snarliest leather-skinned sailor to ever chill the ocean to ice with his mere gaze, and then imagine that that sailor was a cat, then you still would fall short of Herman here. This matted fluffball is a physical embodiment of the Platonic form of “sea cat”. This is the face of a cat who lives on jerkey and rum, who has sung shanties through both doldrums and typhoons, and who thinks nothing of scaling the rigging amid a squall. This cat has exchanged broadsides with Portuguese frigates, dual-wielded cutlasses in boarding duels, slit the throats of mutineers, and rescued crewmates both from cannibal spitroasts and governors’ gallows. He’s torn up his Letter of Marque, bribed a portside prostitute for the route of the Treasure Fleet, and held a dagger in his mouth while climbing up the side of a prize ship in the dead of night. He is eight months old, fifteen inches long, and weighs eleven pounds, and I would not want to cross him in a dark tavern.
Ray Chael says: “I would still pick him up and give him kisses and treats.”
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