Fifty years

Fifty years is a long time. Five decades. Break it down: in months fifty years is 600 months; in weeks it is 2600 weeks; in days (give or take, depending on Leap Year), it is an astounding 18,250 days!

Fifty years ago today, November 30, 1966, I entered the U.S. Army as a Private E-1. It wasn’t voluntary; I was drafted.

I had my pre-induction physical in July of that year, and five months later was finally sucked into the system. During the time between the two events I lived in denial. I thought I would get some sort of last-minute reprieve, but the closer November 30 came the more I came to the acceptance that there would be no divine intervention. I was indeed doomed to two years of active duty in the U.S. Army.

There were some benefits; after I was released in November, 1968, I went home and  a month later got married. I was able to use my GI Bill money for schooling. Two years ago when I went to Home Depot to buy a washer and dryer the saleslady asked, “Are you a veteran?” I said I was. She said, "Good, I can give you a discount.” I don’t remember how much the discount was, but if my two years active duty could save me a few bucks decades later, well then, that’s fine with me.

On Veteran’s Day 2016 I got a free entree from Mimi’s Restaurant. They didn’t even ask to see proof I was a veteran.

I had my share of nightmares the first few years after my discharge. In dreams I would be drafted again and I would be loudly cursing and telling officers and sergeants to stick it up their asses, I wasn’t going to go! Brave talk, but just a dream. In my waking life I wasn’t going anywhere near the Army, and they wouldn’t want me, anyway. It took me me a few years for the dreams to end.

I have written before in this blog that I have a near-irrational fear of being accused of something I didn’t do, and going to jail or prison for it. That paranoia may have grown from my experience of being drafted. The Army wasn’t exactly like jail: there were no iron bars, but there were other similarities, especially in the first two months. All activities were regulated, even being marched to the mess hall for our meals. We were not allowed to have any clothes other than our uniforms, so if we went over the hill we could be easily spotted and rounded up.

Hmmm. That is something to think about! But being regulated en masse goes back to kindergarten, when we obeyed the teacher’s orders. Sit down, be quiet, reading time, exercise time. We have all been through it.

Still, there was a feeling when I got the last day of my active duty Army “service,” I did have a sense of an iron gate creaking open, and being able to walk out into freedom.

It sounds like a contradiction, but now that it is long over and done, I am proud to be considered a veteran. I don’t necessarily feel like a “true” veteran, like the guys who faced an enemy. I spent most of my Army career at a typewriter in Germany doing a clerk job, but my Honorable Discharge, in a frame on my wall, says I am a veteran. No matter how I feel about my service it is more than some people who have held the office of President of the United States. I have one up on men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. Commander in chief is much more grand than Private E-1, as I became when I entered the Army fifty years ago today, but I went through something none of those men went through, and so, yes, I am proud of that.

(For my 40th anniversary recollection of my first day,18, 250 — give or take — days ago, which I remember distinctly, unlike yesterday, which is a blur, go to “Draft Day”, posted November 30, 2006.)

The writer who is ecstatic for the Trump victory

This letter appeared in my local newspaper yesterday.

Copyright © 2016 The Salt Lake Tribune

Ugh. Gloating! I couldn’t stand it. That letter inspired me to write this letter:

Editor:

I thought the letter titled "Ecstatic about Trump" in the June 16 Tribune was satirical. I saw the writer used the German word, “schadenfreude.” I at first believed no true Trump fanatic would even know such a word.

Then I reconsidered. Since the word means to take pleasure in the discomfort of others I thought about the Nazis, who took a whole lot of pleasure in the ultimate discomfort for anyone they deemed not worthy to live in their Aryan world. Consider the Nazi mass murder machine. That reminded me that many backers of Trump are white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan-types who would be very happy to feel such “pleasure” in bringing such discomfort to people they don't want in America.

I then shifted my opinion, and knew the letter was not satire, but from a true Trump fanatic!

Sincerely, Postino

The dog kicker

Yesterday I saw an obituary for a former fellow school district employee, Brent, who died at age 67. Brent was two years younger than me, and he died from a heart attack. Brent was a devout Mormon, so he didn't smoke, drink (liquor or coffee). He was tall and fairly slim. Huh. I thought he'd live longer than he did. Longer than me, anyway. I remember Brent bugged me a lot because when I'd see him he'd get in my face and try to make small talk. He was not a natural small-talker, and as Greg, another coworker opined, "Brent tries too hard to make friends and it drives people away." I could see that. After I saw his obit I thought maybe I should have lightened up my opinion of him. Then I remembered a day maybe 20 years ago when Sally and I were walking into a high school for a meeting, and Brent was on the sidewalk talking to a man. A little dog ran up to Brent, which annoyed him. He hauled off and kicked the little dog and sent it yiping in pain into the bushes. The proverbial red mist floated before my eyes. I stopped and unloaded on Brent, chewing him up one side and down the other. Something a supervisor once told me was, "You have a tongue that cuts like a scalpel." I don't remember exactly what I said, but Brent went red in the face, said nothing, yet after Sally and I walked off he resumed his conversation with the man as if nothing had happened.

The next day I told Greg, Brent's office mate, who said, "Yeah, Brent's old man was like that. He didn't just kick dogs. They'd come in his yard, he'd shoot 'em." After the incident for the rest of the time I knew him Brent never mentioned my loud, angry comments on his act of animal abuse.

Maybe Brent cleaned up his act as he got older. Maybe he mellowed out. But I am sensitive to such cruelty. I am not religious, but it is my opinion that no matter how religious you are or observant of the rules of your faith, if you kick little dogs you should have a long wait to get into heaven.

“The President Will See You...”

After all of the incivility and trash-talking of the 2016 election cycle, and before that the years of the continuous din of disaffected and disapproving citizens complaining about their president,* it was like a breath of fresh air to read this story by Rog Phillips** from Fantastic Adventures, July 1951.

Aliens invade Earth, and yet when they invading America they are polite enough to observe the laws of the land. That is better than real life, where anti-government clods who enjoy American citizenship occupied a federal facility this past winter and trashed it, and other American clods in the federal court jury found them not guilty.

At least the aliens had the decency to ask that their confiscated tanks be returned!

*I plead guilty to that charge during the Bush years.

**Pseudonym of Roger Phillip Graham (1909-1966).

Jack T Chick takes on the Mormons

Jack T Chick died last month. He was 92, and he was religious in that old-time religion way. He was not shy about telling everyone who didn’t believe as he did that they were going to hell.

Chick got religion sometime after he was married in the late 1940s, following his World War II service. He was a cartoonist, and became (in)famous for little booklets explaining how to be saved...in Chick’s opinion that was to believe in the Bible as the literal word of God (any Bible after the King James version was no good to Chick), and then you had to come to Jesus. He was fairly rabid in his dislike for Catholics, and he didn’t care much for Mormons either. The booklets, of which there are many (dozens? hundreds?)* take a negative tone. The booklets follow a formula: someone believes falsely, and some religious stalwart sets them straight. Since there isn’t much room to tell a story it has to be fast, with the wrong person getting the right information and then miraculously seeing the light. (The ones who don’t get the message end up in the lake of fire being prodded by Satan’s demons.)

In The Visitors a couple of Mormon missionaries get the full Chick-treatment from a (forgive me for using this word) chick, who sets them straight with facts about Mormon theology they usually don’t reveal to prospects being proselytized.

I am not religious, but I am an ex-Mormon, and I spotted at least one error. The booklet is copyright 1984, but repeats the LDS belief that black people are cursed with dark skin, a policy which was overturned in 1978.

The artwork is not done by Chick, but by artist Fred Carter.

Anyone could order these booklets by paying for a special printing with their name on the back cover. They were usually given out by churches and religious organizations, but in this case an individual, Douglas King, a “servant of God.”

*Chick also published a line of full color comics in a traditional comic book format, which had the same dire tone as the booklets...they just had more room in which to issue condemnations.

_____________________________

People who believe the Bible to be the be-all and end-all of any discussion can be hard to communicate with. For instance, while even many pious and devout religious people believe in a scientific explanation of the origins of life on earth, when it comes to answers about tricky things like evolution (people were created when the earth was created, and began with Adam and Eve), or dinosaurs (lived amongst people, and their fossils are wrongly thought to be from millions of years ago) there is no equivocation from the Bible-is-the-only-answer-you-need folks. They believe in Creationism as a valid set of facts about everything.

The Creation Museum is open in Petersburg, Tennessee. You can go there and “see the wonders of God’s creations.”

There are also books published with answers to thorny questions about early humans and dinosaurs cohabiting the planet, not unlike the Flintstones or Alley Oop.*

One children’s book, The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible by Paul S. Taylor, from 1987, attempts to explain the so-called “mystery.” As Taylor explains on page 16: “When God created the world, dinosaurs were one of His creations. God created all the animals (Genesis 1:20-25). God made everything in the entire universe—people, stars, planets and all that there is (Exodus 209:11a Genesis 1, John 1:3). Like Adam, the bodies of the first dinosaurs were formed from the dust of the earth. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time.” (Emphasis mine.)

As always, click on the pictures to make them dinosaur size.

I will give the author credit for creating a well-illustrated and fun book, but scientific it is not.

The world of faith must be exceptionally strong that so many people can accept the invisible world of the supernatural rather than the visible work of thousands of dedicated scientists worldwide.

*If you don’t know who Alley Oop is, he is a comic strip characters who was created by cartoonist V.T. Hamlin. Oop lives in a place called Moo, and has a pet dinosaur named Dinny. Here is an early (1934) Sunday page.