What Things are Like Here

Skinner’s Bird’s Nest

 Introduction

I wrote the following for a British blog buddy who wishes to honor me with a visit, but I then had the thought that it might interest others also...

Eugene, Oregon, was founded in 1846 by an Easterner named Eugene Skinner. Upon surveying the area’s enveloping ridgeline from the 682-foot hill in the foreground of the photo, he said “it looked like a bird’s nest.” Skinner had planned to name the town Marysville after his wife, but upon learning that the name was taken by another Oregon community (which later changed its name to Corvallis), his wife designated his new town Eugene City—which was shortened to Eugene in 1889. She also named the aforementioned hill after him, and it bears the name Skinner Butte. However, a highrise near the bottom of the butte bears the mountain’s Kalapuya Indian name, Ya Po Ah, which inexplicably means a very high place.

Mary Skinner

On the west side of Skinner Butte are 45-foot basalt columns which Peggy used to climb in preparation for forays into the High Cascades. In recognition of her mountaineering achievements, the women of her climbing group ceremonially dubbed her Princess Climbing Rose. 

Basalt Columns on Skinner Butte

The distant hill in the top photo is five miles away at what is currently the southern edge of town. 2,058-foot Spencer Butte bears the name of a young Englishman who was killed and mutilated by a Kalapuya Indian on the flank of what they called Rattlesnake Mountain. His was the only known death at the hands of the Kalapuya while their tribe was destroyed by the violence and diseases of the white invaders. I will devote the remainder of this post to a description of the county of which Eugene is the county seat.

Origin: In 1851, Lane County was named after its first territorial governor, General Joseph Lane, an Indian killer and Mexican war hero. Although Lane soon lost favor in Oregon for his support of slavery and Southern secession, early Oregon was nonetheless racist. For example, in 1843, the Provisional Government of Oregon instituted the following punishment for black people who attempted to live here: “…not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county… if any free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit the country within the term of six months after receiving such stripes, he or she shall again receive the same punishment once in every six months, until he or she shall quit the country.”

Location: Lane County extends from the Pacific Ocean to the summit of the Cascade Mountains. Midway between the two is the Willamette Valley, a 120-mile long depression which begins near Eugene and ends near Portland. Although the valley is tiny compared to Oregon’s total land area, three out of four Oregonians live here. Willamette (pronounced wil LAM ette) is a Kalapuya Indian word for Valley of Sickness, a name that was inspired by its supposed healing qualities.

Size: Although Lane County is sixth in size among Oregon counties, it is four times larger than Rhode Island, twice the size of Delaware, and nearly as big as Connecticut. Oregon itself is the tenth largest of American states.

Parks: 12-mile long, 2,000 acre Ridgeline Park is Eugene’s largest followed by 240 acre Spencer Butte Park and 100 acre Skinner Butte Park. Added together, this town of 175,000 people has an impressive 4,200 acres of parkland, while over half of Lane County itself is owned by federal, state, county, and city governments.

Precipitation: Eugene gets 41-inches of rain per year, and isolated parts of the Coast Range get over 100-inches. Precipitation in the Cascade Range consists largely of snow. Due to global warming, the amount of snow in the mountains has dropped dramatically since my arrival in 1986. This is worrisome because the Valley depends upon melting snow to fill its reservoirs.

Deepest Lake: 420-foot, glacier-carved Waldo Lake.

Largest Rivers: the Willamette, the McKenzie, and the Siuslaw. Until the coming of the railroad, steamboats traversed the 300 Willamette River miles from Portland to Eugene—the straight-line distance is a hundred miles.

Elevation: From sea level at the coast to 10,358-feet in the Cascades.

Number of Mountains: 703

Mountain Ranges: Lane County contains portions of the Cascades and the Calapooyas, both of which are volcanic. The Cascades can be further divided into the High Cascades and the Old Cascades—the Calapooyas are a segment of the latter. Lane County also contains a portion of the thousand-mile long Coast Range, which was formed by uplift when the Pacific Plate slid under the North American Plate. 4,097-ft. Mary’s Peak is its highest point in Oregon. 

Number of Active Volcanoes: Seismologists are monitoring a slowly growing bulge on the west side of Lane County’s only active volcano, the South Sister. 

Greatest Natural Hazard: The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 700-mile long area where the aforementioned tectonic plates are colliding. There is a 37% risk of a +9.0 earthquake erupting along this fault in the next fifty years. Before moving here, I had lived with hurricanes, thunderstorms, and tornadoes for my entire life, and there is no way that I would have moved to a place at risk of a megaquake had I known of it, but the threat was not known at the time.

Number of Waterfalls: 206 (https://www.waterfallsnorthwest.com/Oregon/County/Lane)

Number of Glaciers: 7 remain but are rapidly melting.

Tallest Waterfall: 286-foot Salt Creek Falls

Number of Hot Springs: 4

Tallest Tree: a 310-foot Douglas Fir. The Douglas Fir is Oregon’s “State Tree” and its primary timber source.

Number of Covered Bridges: 20.

Ten Crops: 90% of Lane County is forestland, but mint, hops, berries, hazelnuts, lavender, rosemary, vegetables, tree fruits, wine grapes, and Christmas trees, number among its other delightful crops.

Ten Fun Things to Do: hike, bike, ski, raft, fish, kayak, skateboard, snow ski, mountain climb, fly kites at the coast.

Population by Race: People of northern European ancestry constitute 89% of the population followed by Hispanics, Asians, indigenous, and black.(3) Despite the area’s racial homogeneity, modern Lane Countians honor racial diversity with bumper stickers, yard signs, murals, and statues. They also name parks, schools, and streets after well-known members of minority groups. Although black residents represent only 1.3% of the county’s population, they constitute a majority of honorees.

Lane County’s Indigenous Peoples: The last full-blood Kalapuya was “Aunt” Eliza Young who died in 1922, seventy-five years after her relatives offered the hand of friendship to Eugene Skinner. A large majority of Oregon’s Indians died of European diseases that were introduced by an ever increasing number of arrivals starting with the Spanish gold seeker Juan Cabrillo in 1542. Of those Indians who survived smallpox, typhus, typhoid, cholera, measles, pertussis, and other diseases, some were murdered (there being no penalty for it), but most died of neglect after being imprisoned on barren reservations. Even that wasn’t enough for immigrants who believed that America was a modern day Israel; that white Americans had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people; and that indigenous Americans were the equivalent of the Biblical idol worshipers that God ordered killed. By the printing of the March 16, 1872, edition of the Eugene Guardian, few Kalapuya remained, yet this didn’t deter the editor from labeling them a “disgrace” and demanding that they be “tarred, feathered, and hung.”

The Pioneer Mother

Politics: The pendulum has swung to the opposite side of the stupid spectrum since the days when Chinese railroad builders were called chinks and cooleys and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on Skinner Butte in order to intimidate Jews, liberals, non-whites, suffragists, and Catholics. Some examples.... In 2020, Eugene businesses and vehicles were vandalized when a black man 2,000 miles away was killed by a policeman. In another incident, a monument honoring Lane Countians who died in World War II was vandalized, and in a third, University of Oregon students pulled down two large statues and battered one of them with sledgehammers after hearing their history professor say that the Oregon Trail pioneers were thieves, rapists, and murderers who thought they were serving God by destroying lives and cultures that they deemed worthless. Although the demonstration was filmed by scores of cameras, no arrests were made, and the university declined to restore the statues.

Religion: 75% of Lane Countians have no religion followed by the 13% who are Protestant and the 6% who are Catholic. My previous county in Mississippi is at the other end of the American spectrum with 79% of its residents saying they are religious and 0% daring to say that they are not. Religious oppression served as a major motivator for me leaving the state. In one memorable incident, I was rapped on the head by another juror when I declined to stand for a prayer that was led by the district attorney.

Noteworthy Movies: My first glimpse of Lane County came from the movie Animal House with John Belushi (1978), but Stand By Me with River Phoenix (1986) and The General with Buster Keaton (1926) are far better movies that offer a far better look at the countryside. For a list of movies that were shot entirely in Eugene, go to Wikipedia, Films Shot in Eugene.

Nicknames for Eugene: Emerald City, Track Town USA, and Track and Field Capital of the World. The name Emerald City was inspired by the greenery, the others by Eugene’s prominence in track and field events, among which are try-outs for the Olympics. Appropriately, University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman invented the first spikeless track shoe (his company became Nike) in Eugene. Without Limits is a Eugene-made movie about Bowerman and his best-known runner, Steve Prefontaine, who died in a car accident in Eugene at age 24.

Memorial at Site of Accident

Ten Delightful Crops: grapes, mint, hops, berries, hazelnuts, lavender, rosemary, vegetables, tree fruit, Christmas trees.

Ten Popular Things to Do: hike, bike, ski, raft, run, fish, kayak, skateboard, snow ski, mountain climb.

Ten Things that Oregon Got Right: The city of Eugene has purchased over twelve miles of encircling ridgeline so its residents can see trees rather than highrises when they lift their eyes to the hills. Every inch of Oregon’s 362-mile coastline is publicly owned and publicly accessible, and Oregon led the nation in passing a bottle bill, legalizing assisted suicide, decriminalizing cannabis, voting entirely by mail, electing a LGBT governor, legalizing psilocybin, automatic voter registration, and mandating an end to coal-fired power.

A Virtually Unkown Event in Oregon’s History:

The following isn’t related to Lane County, but I’m going to close with it because it is so interesting and so undeservedly forgotten, even in Oregon. On May 5, 1945, Oregon suffered the American mainland’s only World War II fatalities when a woman and five children were killed by a Japanese balloon bomb while picnicking. Some of the women who manufactured the 9,300 balloon bombs that were launched by Japan later apologized for those deaths. The attack had been in retaliation for the 300,000 Japenese deaths in American firebombings of the Japanese mainland. Other nearby Japanese attacks consisted of a submarine firing upon an Oregon fort, and a submarine-carried float-plane dropping incendiaries on an un-inhabited mountain in the hope of starting a forest fire.

In closing: “Renew your youth, enjoy life, and start for heaven from the best town on earth, Eugene, Oregon.”                                                                     Anybody’s Magazine 1906

5 tails, 10 eyes, 20 feet, 56 pounds, 90 toes, 120 whiskers, 150 teeth

 

I hate it when people ask why Peggy and I have five cats because I don’t want to make her look bad for denying me my right to have ten. I ask her, “When I’m dead, won’t you regret preventing me from spending our life savings on cats?” to which she replies, “I’ll just be glad that I don’t have even more litter boxes to clean.” 

From 10:00 to 12:00 each night, I read in bed in the company of cats. Timid little Scully—the tuxedo cat second from left—took years to gather the courage to join me in bed and another year to move close enough for me to reach her. When the noise of wind, airplanes, car doors, heavy rain, and other things frighten Scully, I have the privilege of calming her fears. 

The middle cat—seven-year-old Ollie—was abandoned while nursing. A cat rescuer bottle-fed him every two hours around the clock until he was old enough to eat, and then Peggy and I adopted him. Upon entering his new home, he immediately sought comfort from our fifteen-pound tabby, Brewsky. Brewsky hadn’t been near another cat since he came to us as a kitten five years earlier. He now looked at us as if to ask: “What in the hell am I supposed to with this thing?” After a tense moment, he bathed Ollie and then allowed him to “nurse.” Seven years later, Ollie is still nursing.

Ollie’s worst problem is that he vomits up everything he eats unless I—me, personally—give him special food in a special feeder. Two year’s ago, he started vomiting anyway, so I had to switch from three large meals a day to six small ones. He’s now back to three meals and chattering happily to himself the entire time he’s eating.

The cat at the end of the bed is five-year-old Sage. I usually get out of bed before Peggy does only to have him ignore me. When Peggy appears an hour later, Sage talks to her nonstop being cuddled. In the evenings, she holds him in her arms while dancing through the house. Late at night, they have extended conversations similar to the following. Peggy: Miaow. Sage: Meow? Peggy: No—miaow. Sage: Miaow? Peggy: Yes, miaow. Sage’s eyes open like saucers. Peggy laughs and roughs his fur. Sage says Miaow!!! Peggy responds Meow yourself, Mr. Man! Sage whispers in her ear. Peggy laughs. Peggy and Sage embrace.

Sage’s only flaw is that he becomes abusive when angry, and that too is directed at Peggy. Happily, he only becomes angry every other Friday when she clips his toenails, and only then when she does his back feet. She has to put her face near his while she works, and it is my job to keep his head pointed away from her face.

My hand is on three year old Harvey, who is a beautiful cat although he looks like a dirty dust mop in the photo. After lovingly parenting our other kittens, Brewksy walked right up to Harvey when Harvey arrived with the intention of bathing him. Despite being more fluff than cat, Harvey flattened his ears and hissed. He remains our only cat who has never deferred to The Patriarch of the Cat Side of the Family. He is usually on hand to welcome visitors, and to do what he can to assist repairmen. He also likes to steal my chair—or my place in bed—within seconds of me getting up to do something. When Peggy is brushing him, he will often hook a finger with his claws, hold it in his mouth, and go to sleep. 

Prior to Brewsky’s arrival in 2010, I lived with dogs for 61-years, so I can confidently say that dogs and humans are hierarchists while—except for lions—the world’s 38 cat species live alone except when rearing their young. Yet...

Year in and year out, my five cats live within the same four walls. They share food, play together, tolerate foibles, bath one another, sleep with their bodies touching, settle arguments without bloodshed, and worry when one of their adopted siblings is upset. But if Felis silvestris catus is a solitary species, how are such things possible?

When we got Brewsky, I was as nervous as a new father who had never held a baby. Two days later, we took him to our vet—Sean Barrett—for his first check-up, and I was so impressed by Sean’s handling of him, that I resolved to also move slowly, touch gently, and speak softly. Brewsky and our other cats continued my education by teaching me to behave predictably; respect their independence; demonstrate joy in their existence; pay attention to what they tell me; abandon any hope of obedience or conformity; and avoid coercion whenever possible. 

The love of a dog is a given; the love of a cat is a reward for good behavior. Yet I treated one of my cats in ways that surely would have caused the others to hate me.

Within months of his arrival, Brewsky grew from a cute kitten to a stubborn and willful adolescent who would look me dead in the eye while doing the very things I had just told him not to do. One night while Peggy was at work, I became so angry that I chased him thorough the house while yelling and slapping floors and overstuffed chairs with the flat side of a yardstick. I thought he would run under the couch, but he instead ran through the house in a circuit that ran from living room, to hall, to dining room, and back to living room. After a few laps, he stopped, turned, caught my eye, and rolled onto his back and asked for a belly rub. Thus began a nightly ritual in which I would play the role of a homicidal human; Brewsky would play the role of a terrified inferior; and then we would cuddle. Try as she might, Peggy couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea that what looked like a prelude to murder was actually a male bonding ritual worthy of drunken cowboys in a John Wayne movie.

“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.” —Winston Churchill

Contrary to the feline snobbery suggested by Churchill (who was himself a cat lover), no cat is proud of belonging to one of the better families or ashamed of being from the wrong side of the tracks. While chimps, rats, wolves, humans, hyenas, and meerkats, are busy forming cliques, waging wars, installing dictators, and conspiring to mistreat others, cats are at quietly at home minding their own business. 

People who consider cats cruel, selfish, unloving, fawning, and antisocial, project onto cats what their motives would be if they behaved similarly. According to animal behaviorists.... 

Asking for food, eating it, and then seeking privacy in which to bathe and nap only means that cats feel drowsy after they eat, and that they prefer to sleep in secluded places where they are safe from large predators. Likewise, they wash away food odors so that large predators can’t locate them.... Cat critics are also wrong in thinking that cats have repeatedly capture the same bird or mouse because they’re cruel, the truth being that they are honing their hunting skills. As for other errors...

While it is true some cats dominate other cats, such behavior is situational rather than ongoing, and—unless it results from close confinement—the roles of dominator and dominated reverse after a few months. Although males often fight over females, the queen (for that is what she is called) reserves the right to choose her mate, and she often chooses the loser.... Male cats have the reputation for being absentee fathers, yet some males love their own kittens and—as with Brewsky—the kittens of other males, and even the offspring of other species. 

The following is from the Desiderata* poster that graced the walls of teenagers during the ‘60s and ‘70s: 

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence… As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons… Speak your truth quietly and clearly…Avoid loud and aggressive persons… do not feign affection… in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul… do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” 

To humans, these are aspirational values; to cats, they’re descriptive. 

*https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html

Why Straight Men Are So Weird About Women

My Cat and i

Girls are simply the prettiest things
My cat and i believe
And we’re always saddened
When it’s time for them to leave

We watch them titivating
(that often takes a while)
And though they keep us waiting
My cat & i just smile

We like to see them to the door
Say how sad it couldn’t last
Then my cat and i go back inside
And talk about the past

—Roger McGough

 Heterosexual men are drawn to women like steel to magnets. The attraction is so strong and unremitting that they are often powerless to put it out of their minds. Many conclude from this that women are knowing and powerful beings who have the ability to purposefully control the strength and direction of a man’s feelings. Although naive women sometimes find this view flattering, its overall outcome is unhappiness for men and misery for women. For example:

(1) Some men elevate women to the status of demigoddesses. Because knowledge destroys delusion, a man who builds a relationship with a woman eventually comes to recognize his mistake. Although he might love her by then, his realization that she is human forces him to find someone else upon whom to project his delusion, whether within or without of his current relationship.

(2) Other men’s lust for women leaves them feeling vulnerable, so they attempt to turn the tide by making women vulnerable. Some resort to rape, physical abuse, or browbeating. Others claim that Satan uses women to drive a wedge between men and God, and so it is God’s will that women be rendered powerless and invisible. It was for this reason that the church of my childhood denied women the right to preach, teach Sunday school, ask questions, and make announcements, along with discouraging them from attending college or working outside the home.

As a small child, I was so captivated by the wife of a visiting cousin that I spent the evening in her lap. I would have done anything to please her, and I believed that everyone in the room recognized the necessity of me sleeping with her. When my mother forced me from the woman’s lap, I cried while the adults laughed. 

In an adolescent fantasy, I envisioned a woman walking through Arlington National Cemetery on a lovely spring day. The woman’s beauty gave her such power that entire regiments of dead soldiers followed after her. Such fantasies are not unusual…

Plots of the hit TV show Rawhide! sometimes revolved around the irresistible influence that beautiful but unscrupulous women had over a young and naive drover named Rowdy Yates (played by a boyish Clint Eastwood). Rowdy continued to be entrapped by such women despite his trail boss’s repeated admonition: “Rowdy, just because a woman looks like an angel, it don’t mean she is one.” 

In Jimmy Dean’s song, The Cajun Queen, a New Orleans’ woman resurrects a man who had been dead for days by placing “a red-hot kiss on his cold blue lips.” Then there were the pop-music goddesses from my adolescence: Venus, Earth Angel, Teen Angel, Venus in Blue Jeans, and My Special Angel, songs that flattered women and spoke truth to the fantasies of men. But what does any of this have to do with a poem about a talking cat? 

Although they try to hide it, men often react to a beautiful woman like a dog reacts to a female in heat. This is why some women regard men as slobbering buffoons whose stupidity runs neck-and-neck with their wickedness. The truth is that both genders conform to the roles that nature assigned them. During his lifetime, a man produces 525-billion sperm. During her lifetime, a woman produces 400-500 eggs, only a few of which can become people. This is why nature programmed men to insure the survival of their DNA by impregnating as many women as possible, while it programmed women to seek protection for themselves and their few offspring. 

The man in the poem is tempted by two or more flirtatious women, but instead of hurrying them into bed, he smilingly awaits their departure so he can be alone with his cat. Most men would have as soon thrown the cat—or the piano, for that matter—out the window if doing so would get the women into bed quicker.

Even if a man manages to think about something other than sex in one moment, he is at risk of being overwhelmed by sexual desire in the next, even if he is alone. The man in the poem is not alone. He has leisure, privacy, and two or more willing women. Fortunately, he also has the ability to say no. After age reduced my hormone levels, I too was able to say no. I also stopped mythologizing women. 

“I’m so sorry for that ghost I made you be. Only one of us was real and that was me.” —Leonard Cohen

Despite what women often believe, a man’s struggle isn’t between virtue and intelligence versus depravity and stupidity. It is more akin to the Homerian story in which the irresistible song of temptresses would have lured the hero Odysseus to his death had his crew not protected him. Real men are without protection. Real men struggle alone until they die or old age renders the problem moot.

“I don’t need a lover, no, no, no. The wretched beast is tame.”

—Leonard Cohen

The First 20 or so Things That I Love as They Occur to Me in the Moment

 

Peggy, my wife of 51-years

The circa 1955 house in which we have lived for 32-years

Cats, cat art, cat poetry, cat cartoons, cat fiction, cat history, the cat goddess Bastet

Memories of my mother, my father, Peggy’s mother, my father’s mother, various dogs, and other beloved dead, some of whom I only know through what they left behind

Believing that my mother and father did the best they could despite their failings

Coffee in the morning

Not having to worry about running out of money—at least not very much

Having access to medical care

Blog friends who I will never lay eyes upon

My British friends, Michelle and Philip

Phone calls from Philip

My sister, Anne

My thoughtful and generous former neighbor, Ellie, who just brightened my day with an email

My longtime friends, Jackie and Kurt, who are coming to visit me today

The cartoons of Gary Larson and George Booth

Gomer Pyle’s sweetness, innocence, honesty, and natural ability to find the good in everyone

Ernie Pyle’s ability to write eloquently and perceptively about the war that made him miserable and finally killed him

My houseplants

The marigolds and elephant ears (taro) that I grow in my backyard planter; the petunias that I grow in my front planter

People who are kind to animals

People of exemplary integrity

Knowing that the world’s most generous people are often its poorest

Reading about knots, houseplants and other things in bed at night

Tying knots in the cords that I keep by my bed

Having been born in the first half of the 20th century because since childhood it has made me feel more mature than people like Peggy who weren’t born until the early 50s

Western movies and TV shows

Enjoying old movies and old TV shows with Peggy

The First 20 or so Things that I Hate as They Occur to me in the Moment

Meghan Markle


Big Pharma commercials

Billionaires

Big Corporations

the Far Right


the Far Left


Fox Network


People who neglect their pets, abandon their pets, or refuse to neuter their pets


People who kill animals for fun


Evangelicalism


Catholicism


Islam


Antifa


Neo-Nazis


People who force their religion upon others


People who cheat the elderly out of their life savings


People who use nonprofits like Wikipedia and the Public Broadcasting Service but don’t support them although they could afford to

 

Some clarifications… (1) In order to keep the list short and to make it less generic, I went back and deleted such obvious things as Trump, Putin, and rapists. (2) When I say hate, I don’t necessarily mean hate with a capital H. For instance, a person can be a wonderful human being and also be a Catholic, so when I say I hate Catholics, what I mean is that I hate it that Catholics financially support a sexist and callous institution that destroys lives through its crass materialism, its opposition to birth control, and its shielding of pedophile priests. Same with hunters. Many hunters are moral, generous and otherwise kindly, yet I believe it impossible for someone to remain a hunter following mature consideration of the rights and feelings of other species. I don’t even feel capital H hatred for all neo-Nazis because many such people are young, lost, and desperate for a sense of purpose and belonging. However, as with hunters, I don’t believe that a person of depth and consistency can forever remain a neo-Nazi. (3) Other times, I do mean hatred with a capital H. For example, nothing that could happen to Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump would be bad enough to suit me. Meghan Markle is another story.

So why, in god’s name, did I include Meghan Markle, but having done so, why didn’t I also include Prince Harry? The answer to the first question that the couple are on my mind because every time I turn on news of late, there they are. The answer to the second is that I don’t necessarily think Harry is evil; I think he’s a weakling and a chump. A comparison…

Many years ago, I belonged to a lodge, and in that lodge was a fit, attractive, and popular widower (I’ll call him Larry) in his seventies, who could have had his pick of many of the lodge’s widows if he had wanted. Then came the day that a woman in her fifties (I’ll call her Barbara) transferred into mine and Larry’s lodge from another lodge where she had served as treasurer and was under a cloud of suspicion regarding some missing funds. I couldn’t stand Barbara who was smug, morbidly obese twice over, had an air of entitlement, boasted of her wealth (which I didn’t believe she had), used a walker, and couldn’t shut up about her many health problems. A few months later, Larry told me with wonder in his eyes and awe in his voice that he had “finally” gathered the courage to ask Barbara to go out with him, and—God be praised—she said yes. I thought Harry had lost his frigging mind because Barbara had bad news written all over her. In trying to understand his attraction, all I could come up with was that she was decades younger.

The more I saw Meghan Markle, the more I felt that she was a young and skinny version of Barbara, an estimation that was deepened by the fact she hailed from a family of opportunistic lowlifes. Obviously, good people can come from bad backgrounds, but I doubted that she was among them.

When William and Kate visited America recently, they arrived on a commercial flight, and Kate wore at least one rented dress during the visit. During the same week, Meghan and Harry flew to NYC on a private jet (they use private jets despite their claimed devotion to environmental activism) for an awards ceremony during which Meghan wore a designer dress. Meghan and Harry then tried to steal the show from Kate and William by releasing the previews of their upcoming three-part documentary in which they proclaim that Meghan was victimized by the press, the royal family, and particularly by Kate and William.

In one of those previews, Meghan demonstrated how she curtsied before the queen. It was not a real curtsy; it was how a child would curtsy in play or a grown-up would curtsy if she wanted to show contempt for the person she was curtsying to. Also, in the documentary were photos in which scores—perhaps hundreds—of members of the paparazzi was shown hounding Meghan. Only they weren’t. One such photo was taken at the release of a Harry Potter movie; another was of the press photographing a Trump associate on his way to criminal court; and other photos also failed scrutiny.

Ironically, Harry now claims that William and Kate were envious of Meghan because she was more popular than Kate as was evident from the tremendous press attention Meghan was receiving. Given how horrible Meghan claims it is to be pursued by the press, I should rather think that the envy would run in the other direction, and I would also think that she would be keeping a low profile to avoid future problems. But no, not Megan. She is greatly desirous of press attention now that she is using her claimed victimization to make more money in a year than most of us could make in several lifetimes.

So how did things turn out with Larry and Barbara? Barbara was permanently expelled from the order by the Grand Lodge of the State of Oregon for embezzlement. As for her ever loyal husband, he believed her lies about the charges against her being concocted by people who were envious that her talents and charisma had enabled her to rapidly assume offices that they had worked hard for. Larry immediately denounced his many long time friends, and he angrily resigned from an order in which he had been loved and to which he had devoted his adult life.

Had it not been for that experience combined with the fact that a citizen of my own country is doing her damnedest to bring down the British monarchy for personal gain, I probably wouldn’t hate Markle so. Ironically, I have no interest in the continuation of the British monarchy. As I write, the British government is claiming that it can’t afford to pay its nurses a living wage, and an elderly British friend is complaining that he is given a different doctor every time he becomes ill. I believe that the livelihood of nurses and the welfare of the elderly is more important than King Charles’ palaces. I think most people would agree, yet King Charles has spent 74-years living off the labors of others, and I think I can safely say that he gets to see whatever doctor he wants and that he doesn’t have wait in line to do it. 

The world is often a place where bad people prosper and good people founder, and so it is that talentless celebrities like Markle sometimes bother me out of proportion to their importance simply because I attribute their success to the fact that they are so silly and obvious. I’m surely old enough that I should be above such things, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not.

The Animus Behind Thanksgiving and other American Holidays

 

On November 24, America celebrated its second most popular holiday, Thanksgiving, which originated in 1621, when the 47 survivors of a contingent of 102 English religious dissenters celebrated their first Massachusetts’ harvest. As every school child knows, the Pilgrims came to America in search of religious liberty. What few school children know is that once they arrived, they murdered Indians (whose heads they displayed on posts), and crushed dissent from their own beliefs with stocks, pillories, execution, and banishment. 

School children are rightly informed that the Pilgrims invited their Indian friends to that first Thanksgiving, but they aren’t informed that 95% of the indigenous population would soon be dead of European diseases and their survivors forced onto a reservation. Or that when a party of hungry women and children stepped across the reservation boundary to pick huckleberries, the Pilgrims slaughtered them. With the exception of the Pennsylvania Quakers, the coming of Christ to America was invariably marked by rape, theft, murder, enslavement, mutilation, branding, and forced conversion.

Thanksgiving lacks the mercenary aspect of Christmas, its focus being on families getting together to gorge on 46-million turkeys. Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that Americans are wild about turkey, which, during the rest of the year, is only found in nitrate-laden sandwich meat. However, the Pilgrims ate turkey, so we do too. The holiday is notably depicted in two paintings, one of armed Pilgrims walking to church (Americans might not care for turkey, but we love our guns), and the other of a family of white people preparing to devour a fowl so noble that Benjamin Franklin proposed it as our national symbol. 

As for the governmental celebrations, miscellaneous officials encourage prayer and—of course—thanksgiving, and radio programs that contain only bad news the rest of the year, suddenly talk about how wonderful life is. Then, there’s the annual presidential turkey pardoning in which America’s president of the hour formally pardons a random turkey for unstated crimes, thus allowing at least one turkey to escape the slaughter.

For millions of Americans, the significance of Thanksgiving is less about the day itself than the day after, Black Friday, the official kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. On some years, poor parents form long lines on Thanksgiving night so they can get into stores before the Season’s Hot Toys run out. People are occasionally injured in the opening melee and many more in the slug-fests that follow when stock runs low. I’ve heard rumors to the effect that a few poor parents are able to pay-off their children’s purchases before it’s again time to honor the impoverished Christ child.

This year, my mail carrier brought the happy news that a local store’s Black Friday Sale would begin on the preceding Tuesday. As everyone who isn’t in a coma realizes, the Christmas shopping season actually began in late August when Christmas trees (faux, of course) and plastic ornaments went on display amid the rollicking noise of Jingle Bell Rock and the angelic chords of O Holy Night. Scrooges and Grinches naturally gripe about Christmas decorations displacing other merchandise, with some even arguing that five months of Christmas might not be strictly necessary. 

Another big Thanksgiving event is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Back when the emphasis was on organizational floats, marching bands, and baton twirling young ladies from Dubuque, Iowa, or Montpelier, Vermont, I enjoyed the parade enormously. Now that Internet groups have largely replaced groups in which people actually get together in person, the emphasis is more upon hand-waving actors and lip-synching musicians than upon dogs jumping through hoops or acrobats from Wyoming. In my darker moments, I suspect that the primary purpose of the parade is selling movie tickets, Quarter Pounders, and Disney merchandise—when I tuned in today, I was greeted by a Ronald McDonald balloon followed by a Green Giant float. Such cynicism didn’t blossom unwatered....

When, as a child, I began watching the CBS Evening News with my father, commercials accounted for 13% of the broadcast. They now run 31%, yet that number only includes the obvious commercials, other commercials being woven into the news itself. For example, the ABC, CBS, or NBC anchor will say, “Here is where you can find the best deals on the Christmas gifts you want most,” and the camera will cut to a shouting reporter in a noisy mall who will dutifully rattle off a list of products, prices, and store hours at selected national chains (selected how, I don’t know). Mind you, this is not a commercial, this is, as one anchor puts it, “The news that America cares about most.” 

I was largely ignorant of the extent of holiday commercialization until I was seventeen and took an after school job as the only stock clerk in a small town F.W. Woolworth’s. This was in September and in no time at all, Christmas merchandise began coming up the freight escalator faster than I could unload it. Smart fellow that I was, I had, of course, observed that Christmas involved gifts, but I had somehow overlooked the extent to which the impoverished Christ child had been reborn as a merchandising gimmick. Yet because birth lends itself to celebration, I didn’t find this particularly disturbing—besides, I had spent my entire life benefiting from it—but turning Holy Week (the week that Christ was tortured, murdered, and resurrected) into an excuse to Slash Prices on lawnmowers, chocolate rabbits, and women’s dresses was another matter. 

After Easter comes another solemn American holiday, Memorial Day, the main purpose of which—as I discovered at Woolworth’s—is to honor America’s war dead with the Lowest Prices of the Season on grills, lawnmowers, and patio furniture. Sales on July 4th (the day that celebrates America’s independence from horrid old England), I could understand because it really is a celebratory occasion, and Drastically Reduced Prices on beer, fireworks, picnic supplies, and sports equipment, certainly encourage celebration. 

Labor Day is another matter due to the perversity of “honoring” American workers by forcing millions of them to work harder and longer during yet another Biggest Sales Event of the Year. More recently, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has been added as another truly perverse holiday in that it honors a man who condemned excessive consumption by—wait for it—encouraging excessive consumption with A Sale Too Good to Miss. America now has so many legal holidays (days on which many people get paid for staying home) that we’ve combined Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday into a single sales event called Presidents’ Day, which features Door Buster Markdowns on mattresses, appliances, and furniture. Of course, holidays don’t have to be this way….

Peggy and I celebrate Valentine’s Day with a kiss, even when kisses aren’t on sale. For Halloween, we display a half-dozen knickknacks of scary cats, scary ghosts, and scary pumpkins. For Thanksgiving, we place two cute knickknacks—one of a Pilgrim-clad gentleman squirrel and the other of a Pilgrim-clad lady squirrel—above the stove where we can enjoy them while preparing our feast of Tofurkey™ with gravy, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, walnut pie, and whatever else comes to mind. 

Christmas is our biggest decorating holiday, although gifts play only a small part in it. To whit... We each receive $200 from Peggy’s father; home-baked cheese-straws from Peggy’s sister; and various gifts from a reader of this blog whose generosity is such that she would buy us luxury cars and ocean cruises if she could afford it, not because of how special we are, but because of how special she is. We also prepare a meal that is a repeat of Thanksgiving, but with the addition of Spritz Cookies (made from sugar cookie dough put through a cookie press and decorated with “sprinkles”).

I’ll close on a comedic note by sharing a condensed version of how the long-ago Greek traveler Herodotus described a Thanksgiving pilgrimage to the holy city of the Egyptian cat-goddess, Bastet. Although universally adored by the lower classes, the humble cat-goddess was scorned by the lion-worshiping nobility. Like the mother cats she represented, Bastet was austere yet cuddly, fierce yet protective, and above all things joyful. She told her followers to love themselves, and she ordained that her worshipers gather to have sex, drink wine, play music, dance, and otherwise celebrate being alive. Herodotus writes to us from 450 BC: 

“Now, when they are coming to the city of Bubastis they sail men and women together with a great multitude of each sex in every boat. Some of the women have rattles and rattle with them [note the rattle in Bastet’s right hand], while some of the men play the flute during the whole time of the voyage, and the others, both women and men, sing and clap their hands; and when they come opposite to any city, they bring the boat to land, and while some of the women continue to do as I have said, others shout and jeer at the women in that city, some dancing, and others exposing themselves. This they do in every city along the Nile; and when they reach Bubastis, they consume more wine than during the whole of the rest of the year. To this place (so say the natives) they come together year by year even to the number of 700,000 of men and women, besides children.”