Ranting about how messed up the world is, espcially Oklahoma.
Author Archives: Curtiswselby
They say not to write a blog from a tired space, but I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, so frankly, everything I do is from a tired space. Likely I'm not doing the greatest job of search engine optimization. But I know there are others like me. Passionate about life.
Oldest living dog, Toby Keith, is twenty one years young. If my math is right, that is 147 in “human” years.
Anyone who knows me knows that the love of my life is a dog. She is a beautiful Great Pyrenees, and she loves me so much it’s insane. She jumps on me to hug me, gives me doggy kisses, and nuzzles me with her nose. When she really wants to let me know she loves me she sniffs in my ear. I think the dog is actually the creature that is closest to God, we may have more intelligence, but they have a greater capacity for love.
On March 16, it was announced by The Guinness Book of World Records that a Chihuahua named Toby Keith was the oldest living dog at twenty one years and sixty six day. I haven’t dug much into the story yet but I wonder……does that mean the dog who had been oldest had recently died? So we are rejoicing at the longevity of this dog, but I haven’t had a chance to grieve the loss of the other dog? This is why I quit watching the news, it just moves too fast!
Maggie was an Australian Kelpie that, according to her owner and the website Dogtime.com, lived to be thirty, which would have made her the oldest dog of all time. The owner lost her paperwork, unfortunately, and so Guinness cannot accept her title. But I think she looks like a good doggy, so she is Tired Blogger approved.
When I was a teenager, there was a period of time after Dad lost his job, and before the alcoholism had gotten bad, when we were starting to get close. We’d ride around in the pickup after working on the farm, and he’d listen to old country music on the radio. One of the songs I remember from this time was Tom T. Hall’s Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine. I’ve never had watermelon wine, and I doubt I’ll ever have any extensive time with children ever again, but I can attest that a dog (old or not) is often your best companion. They don’t know or care if you are ugly, they are like God in that they look at the heart of a person, and they judge you by how well you pet them, feed them, and call them good doggy. If you accidently step on a paw they forgive you quickly. They can smell when you are upset, and unlike humans they will actually try to comfort you. In this time when the world seems to be falling apart, and my middle age has left me a pretty bleak vision of the world, a wagging tail still makes me smile. Why can’t people be more like dogs?
Can’t teach an old dog new tricks? America for a long time has been a youth oriented nation. In the sixties, and all the way up till very recent years, being old is the worst thing you can be. We all want to be young and hip, listen to rock and roll, have amazing gymnastic sex, and if you lose your hair or get a belly, your basically done.
Google Trends today gave me the information about Toby Keith, but it also had a Senator’s name as trending, and all the articles that Google says are trending are about how this person (no, it isn’t Biden, but I still don’t wanna name them because my point is not to make fun of a politician, I’m just trying to make a point) is the senior senator of their state, and have been around for a long time making history, but they are starting to show signs of Cognitive Age decline. Almost without exception, the articles point out that we now have the oldest Senate in history, their average age is currently 64. What are we to make of this?
When the Clintons came on the scene in the 1990s, they were the fresh, young, hip new kids on the block. They were not Washington insiders, and America was frankly tired of boring old Presidents. We hadn’t had a young President since Kennedy. Now they are the power brokers, and without meaning disrespect….they are old.
So the world wants to know how to keep their dogs living longer, but also we are afraid our leaders are holding onto power too long and no longer have the capacity (saying they ever had it) to actually lead. As always, we want to have our cake and eat it too.
Classic Saturday Night Live Skit where they turn the tables. Reagan was often mocked for being old, and people joked he had Alzheimer’s, this was a brilliant skit where they turned the tables and kind of made fun of themselves. I wonder how many people were both offended by Reagan jokes and “sleepy Joe” jokes?
“That’s not MY president!” I’ve heard it all my life, you have to remember, my life started in the Nixon Presidency.
So NorthernOkie suggested I write some more about my political journey, saying that a trilogy makes for the best reading. I pointed out to him I’ve already written three posts about it, but then again, as he is literally the ONLY person who is requesting anything from me, I suppose there is no harm about writing some more.
As I write this, I’m listening to Genesis classic song No Son of Mine, likely this is why I’m thinking of the political phenomenon of political polarization. I’m not sure when I first heard this phrase, but I know it became pretty pronounced in 2000 Presidential election. That was the election where Bush won the Electoral votes but not the popular votes, and the Democrats were enraged. “He is not our President!” Several times I saw Al Gore called the “real” President on the talk shows he would go on.
Likely a fair number of you are too young to remember this, but before all the Trump elections, there was the glorious Revolution of the Dimpled Chad! Viva la Revolution!Protesters hold signs and flags in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, Dec. 11, 2000. Of coarse part of the problem is the confusing rules of the game. It’s Electoral votes that really matter, though of course popular votes help. The other part of the problem was uneducated people on both sides of the aisle. Republicans felt Gore had used the Clinton Machine to steal votes, the Democrats felt that going by the Constitutional law where the win is defined by Electoral votes was stealing the election. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
After the 2012 election I just started to retreat almost totally into myself. If not for the friendship of a couple folks I think I likely would have ended up in a mental ward somewhere. Life was painfully difficult. I’d lost faith in my old sources of news, I’d lost faith in our government, and I was losing faith….well, in all kinds of things. It was during this time that Donald Trump became a political phenomenon.
And while I’ve written a fair amount about the Trump controversy (was the election stolen, and did he plan a coup?), I’ve not written much about what I actually think of Trump. And really, other than this blog here, there is not much more to say about my political philosophy today.
Through the eighties and nineties, I frankly despised Trump. Likely unfairly, I frankly didn’t know much about the man. But he seemed to me to be a spoiled little rich kid, and I saw him as the symbol of everything wrong with American greed.
I really don’t even remember much about Trump from this time. I remember hearing about how he had billions, and that he could spend $100,000 a day, and he would still have money twenty seven years later. I didn’t know (or care) what political party he was with. If I had heard he was a Republican, I would have felt he was one of the stuffed shirts that I felt were part of the problem.
In the meanwhile, I was getting disgusted with politics, trying to salvage a marriage with a verbally and emotionally abusive wife, working anywhere from 90 to 100+ hours a week, and trying desperately to be a good father to my infant son.
The Apprentice was advertised, if memory serves, around the time of Christmas, 2003. Not quite ten years before I became a fan of Ron Paul. This would have been my first Christmas as a father. Desperately trying to provide for him in a world that seemed designed to destroy me.
The Apprentice aired January 4 of 2004. It was a new year, and the last year that I felt any hope that maybe I could make a career where I was at. I had turned my department around, people were talking about the good job I was doing. In the meanwhile both my ex and her mother were complaining I didn’t make enough (adjusted for inflation, I was making almost eighty thousand, but that was not enough for them) and I was getting to an age where I felt that I really needed to figure life out yesterday. I was in my thirties, and running out of time if I wanted to achieve any of my dreams while I was young.
I won’t say much about the show except that whoever was producing it did an amazing job. I started out watching it for curiosity, and also because in the back of my mind it seemed like an amazing idea. This was what Capitalism was really supposed to be about, after all. You compete, but you compete intelligently. You learn how to make allies and struggle against enemies. You learn how to get the job done. And you learn (arguably) from the best. Also….I won’t deny….but seeing some of these elegant bozos turn out to be no more than stuffed shirts, and to see them get called on the carpet, made me feel better about my own life. And that first season I gotta hand it to Donald….he did an amazing job of playing the part of a super intelligent, tough but fair businessman.
Right here is where Trump lost me. People think I’m joking, but no….if it looks, quacks, and craps like a duck, at some point you have to call it a duck, and Trump’s corporate backstabber reasoning for firing Lou Ferrigno was what finally lost my respect.
The gloss started to wear thin for me when the show became The CelebrityApprentice. A great deal of the appeal had been the idea of fairly ordinary folks struggling, competing, and learning the skills to become a high level CEO executive. Celebrities….by definition….they’ve arrived. Most of them didn’t learn anything. Most of them won on their celebrity status and not on their business skills. More and more I didn’t care. And when Trump fired Lou Ferrigno for “disloyalty,” when his team frankly might not have lost had they listened to him…..to me it basically just demonstrated that Trump was no more than a corporate hack.
“Ghost Writers in….the sky…..” Tony Schwartz, ghost writer for Trump on the classic autobiography The Art of the Deal, according to The New Yorker, did an amazing job with the book making Trump look good (I’ve read it…..it frankly does do an amazing job of making Trump look good), only to regret it when Trump was elected.
Another thing that caused me to lose faith was Trumps books. I can honestly recommend The Art of the Deal as an entertaining and informative read, if not about business, at least about how Trump sees business. His other books (ok….I’ve only read two others) were frankly dull, and all I really learned from them was “you better get rich soon buddy! Otherwise the rich are gonna devour you and there will be nothing you can do about it!” “Oh…..ok Mr. Trump….how do I get rich?” “Read my books….start a business….but don’t start a stupid business, start a smart one. A really big, profitable business.” “Ok……how do I do that?…..Mr. Trump…..? Mr. Trump!? “And hear the sounds…..of silence…….” Yeah, I already knew that, I’ve been watching the rich devour the poor all my life. I’m frankly glad that Trump and Kiyosaki (who I have more respect for) want me to be rich. But I don’t need a book to tell me that if I don’t do something fairly soon, the world is going to chew me up and spit me out. I have at least some common sense. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
Here is Donald Trump with radio conservative talk host Michael Savage. I honestly believe that it was Savage, even more than Hannity or Limbaugh, who helped Trump win the first election.
About this time I was only listening to two of the conservative talk show pundits. The rest had just convinced me they were sell outs. The two were Michael Savage and Jerry Doyle (may he rest in peace). Michael Savage was selling his own brand of conservatism, which I don’t agree with any longer, but at the time he seemed to be more passionate on some levels, and more open minded on others. He wrote a book in which he suggested the nation needs to be run like a business instead of an empire. Trump read the book and the rest is history. I’ve no idea what happened to Savage, I believe he finally offended enough people it’s hard to find him on the air, and honestly, I’ve moved on. But the right wing was sold on the idea, disgusted with politics as usual, and the media just could not get enough. Ironically, once they got him elected, they turned on him like rabid wolves. The rest of my thinking about Trump has been chronicled in previous posts, which I will leave below:
Ok….I think that is it….hopefully this puts into full perspective my thinking on Trump. To sum up though…..he took the hopes and the maxims of the conservative movement, he pretended to be one of us when he honestly never was, and he got our votes. Michael Moore said it best….we’d never had a candidate stand up for us so well. Then he won, and the rest was….well…..you make up your own mind. Just like with Jesus, I can point out facts, but honestly you may think more clearly than me, and thus may come to better conclusions. All I will say is….I voted for Trump the first time. The second time….I voted for Rand Paul in the primary, and Jo Jorgenson in the proper election. Make of that what you will.
I can assure you when I was listening to him, Michael Savage didn’t say these things about autistic children. I want to be fair to him, he grew up with a special needs brother, so while I disagree with the statement, I don’t hate him or think he should be taken off the air. But I totally get how these parents feel. Raising an autistic and hearing things like that…..it’s tough to deal with.
Pope Francis washing the feet of a Muslim prisoner just outside of Rome.
Today is actually Good Friday. My son is out of school today. By rights I should have him, like I did last year. I still have about half of the Easter candy I bought for him. I should throw it out. But it is one of the few things I have left of him.
The Christian story is that God sent His only Son to Earth as Jesus. And Jesus was somehow both God and Man, and lived a sinless life even though He was entirely human. We even have him making a mistake, though not a sinful one. We know that He once had to repeat His prayers to have them answered. Dying on the cross, He asked His Father a question that I think anyone who lives very long has asked. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
La Pieta sculpture by Michelangelo. All the people come and go, speaking of Michelangelo. But seriously….even if you don’t believe the Bible….Romans (and a lot of other cultures) actually crucified people. Terrible to lose a child, even a grown child, but I can’t imagine losing a child this way and not breaking.
When I was a child, I really didn’t understand Easter. I knew it was about bunnies and eggs and something about Jesus dying and coming back from the dead. And while it was a great story, I didn’t understand how in the world it saved me from sin. I’ve heard many and many a theory, and I know some are satisfied by this story, and some by that. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it lately. Especially since each passing day I become more and more afraid I will never see my son alive again.
This is currently believed to be the earliest existing artwork honoring Jesus. It is a painting from the wall of a Syrian church, the painting has been dated to roughly 235 AD
I will say three things here.
1) Some say Jesus never existed. Let’s look the historical evidence to see if that is plausible, as some say about figures like Krishna or Osiris.
2) Some ask “which Jesus”? There were after all many claiming to be Messiah in those troubled times, as Josephus records.
3) Did Jesus ever claim to be God, or did that belief grow over time?
If Jesus was merely a myth (in the modern, not the scholarly sense), then there could still be profound truths in the Christian religion, but like many ancient religions, those truths are based only on stories. So let’s look at the historical evidence we have.
The painting I’ve shared would have been created two hundred years after Jesus crucifixion. A quick Google search shows the most prominent person to have died roughly 200 years ago was Napoleon. The next most prominent was the poet John Keats. Now, I grant we live in different times, so perhaps this logic doesn’t apply, but if the Syrians of 235 AD were willing to paint Jesus, it tells me that at least the stories about Jesus life and miracles were around at that time. I’m inclined to think they would not be worshipping someone who had not existed at all. Having said that…..the stories of Molly Pitcher (a woman who purportedly carried water to the thirsty American soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth and took her husbands place firing the cannon when her husband died) cannot be proven to have existed. However, there is a diary of a Continental soldier who reports a woman was “reaching for a cartridge” at the battle field and she was narrowly missed by a cannon ball. He does not name her. But while there may or may not have been a Molly Pitcher, a woman was there in the thick of the fight. https://www.history.com/news/who-was-molly-pitcher Working with this example, I think we can extrapolate that if we have paintings of Jesus in 235, likely there was someone running around doing some of the things Jesus was reported as doing.
One of the greatest archaeological finds of the Twentieth Century, The Dead Sea Scrolls have given us an insight into the Judean world view from the Third Century before Christ, to the first century after. Jesus is not mentioned, so we must search elsewhere for evidence.
So someone existed who did some remarkable things, or said some remarkable things, and people were worshipping this person two centuries later. But it is rightly pointed out that there were many claiming to be the Messiah in the First Century. Josephus lists several in his histories. He even mentions Jesus, but the paragraph where Jesus is mentioned is held suspect by some scholars. As far as I can discover, the oldest complete copy of Josephus dates from the eleventh century, though there are incomplete Latin copies that go back to the sixth. Some believe the paragraph about Jesus was either inserted, or at least greatly exaggerated by Christian scribes. The Jews, who had literally religiously scribed the Old Testament and kept it astoundingly accurate (as far as transcribing) over the centuries, made no efforts we know of to preserve Josephus. So we are back to square one. Somebody did or said something, but who? And what can we really know about them? Is it not likely (say critics) that the New Testament was at least as likely doctored as Josephus?
To my thinking, the greatest contribution Josephus makes is to relate the history (albeit mostly from the Roman perspective) of the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the story of Masada. There was a mini series about it when I was a child, and the power of the story never left me. The Israeli military to this day take an oath that Masada will not fall again. Some will say that is foolishness. Maybe it is, but I can’t help respect the Klingon like aspect of it.
Looking up several more websites to corroborate (as best as a tired blogger can) I find there are several verses from the Gospel of John that we have from no later date than 175 AD AD, granted, 140 years later, but still basically written by a scribe who may have theoretically had a chance to talk to someone who had talked with the apostles. This would be less than eighty years from the time the Apostle John died. While this does not prove the Gospels, it does prove that we had the story of Jesus trial no later than 175 AD. The Romans were a very practical people, and the archives of that time would have been easy to look up. The Roman’s disputed Jesus divinity, but not his existence, nor that of Pontius Pilate, who is mentioned in this papyrus. We have here John 18: 31-33, and John 18:37-38, so by this time we have Pilate asking Jesus if he were king of the Jews, and Jesus responding, “A king am I. For this I have been born, and (for this) I have come into the world.”
So our earliest manuscript does not have Jesus claiming to be God (though there is also nothing here where he denies it). But he is making claims to be a king, and something special. So what about those who say he never claimed to be God, and that was a myth that grew later?
I wrestled with this one for many years. Lots of prayer, lots of Bible reading, and listening to many a sermon. You see, my father was a Mason. Thirty second degree Scottish Rite. To put it into perspective…..there are thirty three degrees, thirty third degree being the top one. He tells me he had been taught that Jesus was only a man…very holy, very special, but not God. So I wrestled with this a long time.
If the Scriptures are even just historically true, the condemnation of Jesus was one of the great injustices of all time. He would know what it is to be falsely accused by the world, and falsely condemned.
There are two verses in the Gospels (yes, the Apostles call Jesus God, but in my mind what counted was what Jesus himself said. Frankly, Jesus wasn’t running around saying “I am God” all the time). In John 8:58 Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” I didn’t understand this until a pastor gave a sermon on “I AM.” Evidently Jesus was referring to Exodus 3:14, when God tells Moses His name is I Am. In effect to those questioning him, this was the same as saying “I am God,” hence they were going to stone him for blasphemy. And at his trial Jesus answers the prosecutor’s questions about whether he is the Son of God (Luke 22: 66-71) with statements that sound like “yes” to me. And they sounded enough like it to the Sanhedrin. They convicted him of blasphemy. So to me the question becomes….did Jesus say these things, or were they added by scribes, like the statement in Josephus? And how early do we have these statements in print? Lets start with the last question, as it likely is the easiest to answer. We have a “wealth of scriptural evidence” so lets do some digging.
The earliest Gospel Scriptures we have. And Pilate responded “What is the truth.”
The best I can find, the latest we have evidence of the manuscripts saying “Before Abraham was, I AM,” is between 175 (there is that number again) and 225 AD. I can’t perfectly pin down the other text, but we have the Gospel of Luke complete by the fourth century. So whether it evolved or started from the beginning, we have the Gospels themselves with the claim in 225 AD, with it being Canonical in most churches by the fourth century.
So what are we to make of all this? I cannot tell you what to think or believe. I’m just giving you the very vague scholarship of a tired blogger. If you believe, then God bless you. If you believe something else, then I simply pray that the True God Who is bigger than my beliefs or confusions will lead you on a kinder path than I have walked. And that our illusions of God are shattered, and replaced with a greater Truth every day. And if you believe there is no God, we are still children of the same Creation that made us all. Happy Easter to one and all.
Some won’t like this, but it is one of my favorites from my youth.
Ron Paul drew rock star sized crowds….yet….wait….am I having an example of the Mandela Effect….?
The early 2000s is dimmer in my memory than any other decade. I remember my marriage….my ex wife being chased by bees….9/11….the birth of our son…..long hours at work….and beginning to pray every day I would not wake up. I didn’t really follow politics. On my drives between stores in my sales routes I would sometimes listen to conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and, in my heart, the best of them, Jerry Doyle. Frankly….the only one I am not currently a bit ashamed of having listened to would be Jerry Doyle.
Time passed. George W Bush was the darling of the Conservative movement, till we took Iraq and it was revealed they had no weapons of mass destruction. He declared “Mission Accomplished” in a war that broke Vietnams record as America’s longest (and arguably most failed) war. And then I heard the news about his failure to provide leadership with hurricane Katrina. There was backlash, and the Republican party that had had power handed to them on silver platters by a populous terrified of another 9/11 turned to the Democrats. The Democrats, like everyone, wanted the old glory days back and tried to nominate Hillary Clinton. But there were too many scandals, and she just did not connect with people like Barrack Obama did.
This was the time I was starting to lose faith in conservative talk radio. I heard so many things about how evil Obama was, how he was racist, how he was Muslim. John McCain led his campaign (if memory serves) mostly on issues, claiming that our military had been badly downgraded. He chose Sarah Palin as a running mate, and Rush Limbaugh lauded that as brilliant, but the liberal media eviscerated her. It seems to depend on which side of the aisle you sit on whether she deserved this or not.
And a name popped up in this campaign that stirred very vague memories. A Libertarian, and every single conservative talk radio personality I listened to, except Jerry Doyle, berated the man for being crazy, unelectable, and dangerous.
His name was Ron Paul.
Air Force Captain and Flight Surgeon Ron Paul saved Rambo from the Hanoi Hilton and charged through thousands of VC to save Mother Theresa from a snake pit. What? Wrong again…..I’ve gotta check my sources….
Obama was elected, and conservative talk radio spiked up the rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong, some of the news items were true, and like all Presidents I have studied, there were plenty of things that, if I could have confronted him face to face, I would have called him out on (the whole “Fast and Furious” debacle).
By the next election, conservative talk radio had convinced me of all the evils of Obama (again, my thinking is no longer the same, so don’t turn me off if you are a lover of Obama). The only two things I was never convinced, because the talk shows did not give convincing proof, I was never convinced he was a Muslim, and I never believed Michelle was a woman.
Obama’s last election was when I gave up on politics. Talk radio was making all these insane claims and was demanding that someone take the political fight to the Democrats. At the time, I was blogging. The election got me off topic (about which, the less said, the better), and I honestly was not liking the direction either party was going. There was no leadership, no vision. Just good ol’ boy politics and business as usual.
I researched the heck out of things when the Republicans were down to four front runners. Romney, the one who was nominated, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul. Conservative talk radio was not excited about Romney, but they fawned all over Gingrich and Santorum. But of Ron Paul….I heard so many warnings that he was going to be the end of the Republican party. So I researched, and when I was done, he was “my” candidate.
I honestly don’t want to rehash all my old thinking here. I’ve changed since then for one, and for another, I wrote pretty extensively about things back then, in a fly by night blog entitled Noxforchristmas. I thought about leaving a link, but my ex wife has carved it up so much, and so many of the videos I linked to it are now down, that I frankly don’t feel the desire to link to it. But I promise, I put a lot of reasoning into being a Ron Paul backer.
And it was all for nothing.
Ron Paul was booed at the South Carolina Republican debate for saying America should start living by the Golden Rule. This was the exact moment I gave up on the Republican Party.
I won’t reproduce here the many pages I wrote trying to convince what was then twenty or thirty followers why they should vote for the man. That cause is lost, and America as a Republic had already been dead for a couple of decades. But in the end, he profoundly affected how I think. For what it is worth the guy is extremely intelligent, and incredibly well read. His faith in liberty is admirable. Maybe he is wrong. I know I have been many and many a time. But I’m glad I learned about him. I learned a lot about politics. Oh yeah….
The infamous Mandela Affect. When thousands of people remember something one way, but the facts (and thousands of others) remember it another way….
Why did I mention the Mandela Affect at the beginning of the blog? I seem to remember him only getting one or two percent of the vote….yet when I looked him up today, the internet shows he obtained 8.09 percent of the delegates at the National Convention. Second only to Romney. I suppose that is possible, but it is hard for me to understand. But at the end of the day, the cause of Liberty is lost, anyway, or so it feels.
I won’t continue my deconstruction of my political thought any further, unless someone has some excellent questions I can answer with another post. Let me know in the comments what you would like me to write about next, or if you ever followed a political figure you felt was the best thing ever, only to have them fail, or have them let you down? I’d love to know what other people’s experience has been like.
El Rushbo was right….Ron Paul did, in some sense, end up being the end of the Republican party. He proved to me how morally bankrupt they were right here.
PS…..I never knew this, but even though he didn’t run in 2016….one of the electors voted for him…..just….saying
So in my last post, I had given a very rough explanation of the evolution of my thought up to about the point I was twenty. Why does that matter? Likely it does not in the grand scheme of things, but at least fourteen people are interested enough to follow me, so I hope they get some entertainment or insight from what I write. Even if you disagree with me, hopefully it helps you understand the grass roots of the Conservative Movement better. And as we all know: Plato says “Know thyself.” Sun Tzu says that if you know yourself and know your opponent, victory is all but guaranteed. (Hm…..maybe I should stop writing….or start writing disinformation….). But in the end, this blog is still mostly self therapy….a voyage of self discovery…..an effort to think and therefor, hopefully, get closer to the truth.
For those who have not read it or need a refresher, here is my previous post:
Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, likely next to Buddha the most venerated person in Chinese beliefs. In some ways he was very conservative, in others he was was a reformer. I think the best conservatives are that way, hoping to preserve the best of our culture, while also improving it where possible.
In my last post I talked about Reagan and then how I started to feel disillusioned. Now I’m about to make an admission that will likely lose me half my audience. But if you’ll forgive me for being the second gunman by the grassy Gnoll…..what…..? They have a Cave Troll? Oh well…..I guess it’s time to break out the big guns….
The summer I tried (and failed) to reconcile with my father, he introduced me to the radio conservative behemoth, Rush Limbaugh….
Yeah….I can already hear the “unsubscribe” buttons being pushed….what if I said I was kidding….? What if I said all I did was invent the Covid virus….no harm, no fowl?
If you pick and choose the things people say, you can make anyone sound horrible. Rush wasn’t perfect, but he did teach me a lot. This statement is one of his that best explains why he was so popular, and why liberals are not entirely correct.
I learned three things from Rush Limbaugh in the nineteen nineties.
1) Taxes are not implemented to pay for government spending. We print money from the Fed for that. Taxes are mainly just social engineering. Punish the behavior we don’t like, then bribe voters with entitlements to ensure we stay in power.
2) We cannot trust the mainstream media. They have their own agenda, and it does not involve our well being.
3) The deck is indeed stacked. Big government, big media, sometimes (I wish he had talked more about this) big business colludes to make sure the lower classes stay in their place. We control the barriers of entry, not to ensure quality and promotion by merit, but to make sure the only people allowed into the club are “our kind of people.”
I became passionately conservative, but I also attempted to stay open minded. If it was true (as I then believed) that the Liberals were ideologues that did not fight fair, falling into the same trap was not wise. It was not Conservatism I sought. It was truth. And I will admit, most of my life I’d watched these movies and seen these people making fun of me for believing, not so much the things I believed, but for imagined things they accused me of believing. “Oh, you are Conservative. You hate all the Blacks, and you verbally abuse women, and you take advantage of your White privilege to live your life of luxury and keep the people down.”
To which all I can say now is….if my life is a life of luxury (and granted, compared to a lot of third world folks it likely is), I don’t wish to see what poverty is…..
The decade passed in wealth and scandal for the nation, in a Culture War that seemed to pit the Liberal Clintons against the Grinch Conservatives led by Newt Gingrich, when actually both sides were gaming the system to make sure they were the winners and we were the losers. Whereas I spent the entire decade in illness, poverty, depression, and never ending soul searching that seemed to lead to no solutions.
Here we see the affects of Conservative radio, simple uneducated Southerners are transformed by wicked witchcraft into Newt Gingrich…..what…..? This is a scene from Monty Python……? Never mind……
But the millennium turned. My life was changed by a marriage to a verbally abusive woman. And the world was changed by a horrific terrorist attack. But this post is going long, and I’ll continue later. Hopefully I haven’t lost anyone, I don’t think the same way I did twenty years ago….
Neither President is above criticism, but the spirit of “country before party”…..are those things just relics of the past? Is the best of the free life behind us now? I searched for hours, trying to find a balanced video about Rush Limbaugh, but I cannot. It was either just Left Wing mudslinging or Right Wing adulation. Constructive critical thought about the man, if it exists, is buried deep.
Robert Peel, credited with founding the Conservative Party in Great Britain
My first memory of politics was when I was five. I remember asking my dad about it. It’s been too long ago, I don’t remember why I was thinking about it. Perhaps there was an ad, or something on the news. At any rate, I asked Dad who he was voting for. His response was “Jimmy Carter, because he’s a farmer, and we need a farmer for President.” Four years later he would be cussing Carter a blue streak, praising Reagan to high heaven, and vociferously voting Republican the rest of his life.
Navy Lieutenant James Carter. Most of my life I was told he commanded a submarine, from my internet search all I can verify is he had the ambition to command a submarine. He did graduate from the Naval Academy, and had experience on a nuclear submarine, but as far as my research goes he did not serve as commanding officer.
Since I was a child, and basically believed almost everything my parents said as gospel truth, I thought that Jimmy Carter was the biggest moron. But, I don’t any more. I’ve grown up. He may in fact have been the wrong person for the Presidency at that time, but I now believe he is an honest, intelligent man who had our countries best interests at heart. But we all know what the path to Hell is paved with…..
The years when I formed my stoic go down swinging philosophy were dominated by Ronald Reagan. For the first year or two I thought he could do no wrong. The hostages that were taken in Iran (I thought) due to Jimmy Carter’s weakness had been released. In my mind, of coarse it was because they feared Reagan. Now I realize that, while there may have been an element of fearing Reagan, there was surely some of it due to Carter’s negotiations. But I was a child, I didn’t know.
How can I ever forget Reagan on tv, trying to console a grieving nation after the Challenger exploded? I’ve never in my life seen a President rally our nation like he did
I concede, now that I am grown, he made mistakes. Frankly, he made profound mistakes. The bank closures of the early eighty’s and the Iron Contra affair frankly were just plain stupid. And in my humble opinion, our country never did recover from the bank closures. I know my family never did.
Yet we always loved Reagan. And honestly, I still do. I love him for three reasons.
1. He built our military back up from the depressing state it had been in in the seventies to the state of the art dominant military that rolled through Iraq so quickly (only to be bogged down there by bad politics).
2. He kept a tough stance but was yet willing to negotiate. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always felt had he not been President, the Cold War would not have ended in my lifetime. Though for all I know maybe he just extended our life a few decades.
3. In my lifetime, the only President who even came close to being so able to touch the heart of the American people as well was maybe Bill Clinton. His speeches were the most iconic, most well written and well delivered of any President since Kennedy.
Here is a fairly well balanced site that gives an evaluation that will help anybody who doesn’t know much about Reagan a good idea of what he was like.
Reagan had a way of making you feel proud to be American. Nobody since has made so many feel that way.
I went to collage during the administration of George H. W. Bush. I don’t want to be a Bush basher here, but for whatever reason, he rarely touched the heart strings the way Reagan could do. Whether there is an art to winning the hearts of the people and Bush didn’t have it, or whether we are all just shallow and like how handsome Reagan was, Bush just didn’t have the same amount of love from the American people. I started to change some of my thoughts with the things I was learning in collage. I was just learning how to learn, and learning that some of my pat ideas of youth were wrong was harsh. I started to become more and more liberal….and then….
I got sick. I tried to reconcile with my father. That ended up being a mistake. But there was one thing that I was introduced to that again changed my thinking, and turned me into a staunch conservative.
This post is running long, I’ll write more about the evolution of my political thought in a later post (unless my readers want me to write about something else). If you want to know who influenced me in the nineties, stay tuned….
War is terrible, and there is no way around it. Whether you agree we should have gone to war with Iraq or not, you have to admit this is terrible. Does anyone deserve to die this way?
Ken Burns has produced another amazing documentary, this one about humble Uncle Ben.
It can be hard to find a worthwhile topic to write about when you are the Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight). Today I was feeling much less than inspired, so I did a trick that likely is not as clever as I think it is. Often when I feel “stuck” I look up what is being searched on Google Trends. As often as not I come away with a topic I can feel passionate about. And if not, as often as not I find something to make fun of. So today I found that my good old Uncle Ben was in Google Trends. It warmed my heart to see a Founding Father there. So let’s see what there is to say about this topic.
This is the film that made Ken Burns a household name. It is a nine part series on (wanna take a guess?) the Civil War. It was narrated by the Pulitzer Prize winning David McCullough, had Morgan Freeman as the voice of Frederick Douglas, as well as country legend Hoyt Axton, Civil War author Shelby Foote, Jeremy Irons, Kurt Vonnegut, and Laurence Fishburne as Wace….what…wrong film….this one was much better….? Never mind.
As my nephew with the Masters in History would point out, neither Ken Burns nor David McCullough are true “historians.” But in my humble opinion, that does not entirely discredit their work. Rather like I’m not going to drastically criticize William Shakespeare for his historical plays because of anachronisms or inexactness in his timelines when after all….we’re talking about f—ing Shakespeare here.
I believe I have only seen a bit of this particular documentary. If memory serves, some few years before I finally left my ex wife, this came on, and I really wanted to watch it. PBS was doing one of their telethons, and she had been watching because of something they were selling Gaither records, and she allowed me to watch maybe twenty or thirty minutes of this. All I really remember was some letters written by soldiers to the wives they had left at home to join the fray.
It was heartbreakingly beautiful. Even my ex couldn’t quite ruin it, though the channel was turned after the letter.
Ken Burns is one of the iconic documentary makers of our day.
So….while I understand why people in general are googling my uncle Ben, perhaps my twelve or so readers are curious why I care.
First of all, I actually am related to him. I joke about him being Uncle Ben, but the relation is obviously quite a bit further removed. I mean, yeah I’m fifty, but come on….
I don’t have the book in front of me, I think my mother has it. But one of my ancestors was a sergeant in the American Revolution, and spent the winter in Valley Forge with the Continental Army. His parents (or maybe grandparents) were Benjamin Franklin’s aunt and uncle. Small world huh?
Here we have an accurate modern artist’s rendering of Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity with a kite. I’ll need to look up Zeus stats in the Legend Lore….I knew Uncle Ben was a badass but I didn’t realize he was that nasty….why couldn’t I have some of those stats…..?
The second reason my heart was warmed by the trend is…I think our nation is falling apart, and maybe….just maybe….if enough citizens learn what America is actually all about, maybe we can get this ship turned around before we hit the ice berg.
I’ve been haunted by the idea of America falling since I saw Red Dawn as a teenager. As a grownup I realize the movie is totally unbelievable. (Although having said that….the war in Ukraine might make me reevaluate how strong I think the Russian military is)…..I no longer believe a squad of teen kids could defeat the Russian army.
But as a kid I romanticized the idea. Fighting for my fallen nation, like the Jewish Zealots in the time of Christ. Winning back our liberty, building back better, with me, of coarse, as some kind of bigwig. Maybe a general.
All foolishness.
Uncle Ben reading a post from The Tired Midnight Blogger What Blogs at Midnight. It’s a little known fact he can read his descendant’s relative’s blog posts across the deeps of time. That’s how he got most of his best ideas like daylight savings…..
If you have some time to kill this weekend, log onto PBS.org and learn a bit about my Uncle Ben. Tell ’em the Tired Blogger sent ya.
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 