Tag Archives: americana

735. In the Middle

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I grew up in a firmly Republican household. Democrats were fools and maybe pinkos. (It was the fifties.) Black marchers in the deep South were just outside agitators from the North.

Watching people being firehosed for asking to be treated as humans convinced me that the last part was wrong. Just observing the world convinced me that the first part was wrong.

But it didn’t make me a Democrat. Just because X is wrong, that doesn’t mean Y is right.

My background does make me want to scream when some talking head says that were are “so polarized, more than we ever have been.” Really? Perhaps they should read a history book. America has always been polarized. We even fought a war over our polarization back in the 1860s.

When my parents hated Democrats, and Democrats probably hated my parents, they were just being the same kind of abrasive American we have always been.

So I have chosen to be neither an Elephant nor a Donkey, just a stubborn schmuck who listens to both sides.

Let me put that in the fewest possible words:

Every opinion has another set against it.
Learn only one opinion, and you think you know everything.
Learn the other and you find yourself right back to knowing nothing.

As Spock said to Kirk, “The answer probably lies somwhere in the middle.” But where in the middle? That’s the hard part, and it is up to you to figure it out.

That is, unless you want to stamp a Donkey or and Elephant on your forehead and stop thinking altogether.

733. American Peasants

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The semiquincentennial has passed. The fireworks are all over and the futile attempts to summarize 250 years in an hour are mostly over. 

America’s 250th birthday was too big an event to capture in a post, so I didn’t try. Instead, here is my American story — a thumbnail view of the last 150 years of my own family.

We were American entrepreneurs.

We were American peasants.

Both statements are true. The three generations I know well were part of capitalist America, with all its potential for success and failure. We (my grandfather, father, and I — until I escaped to college) were also farmers, which placed us at the mercy of the weather and of market conditions.

My father, if he were alive today, would be 100 years old.

My paternal grandfather, if he were alive today, would be 152.

My age? Never mind, but the three generations of us have seen a lot of history.

Between them, my paternal grandparents had twelve children. The first died in infancy, the last was stillborn. That isn’t a bad record for a time when most diseases were incurable. The eldest surviving children were mostly married and on their own by the time the youngest arrived.

My grandfather came to Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory. So did my grandmother. They married there in 1902; Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

Their first house was without plumbing or running water. That was typical. Like most people of that era, they were farmers. Thirty years later they survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, largely because they lived in the far north-eastern part of the state, on the edge of the Ozarks, which had less drought and fewer dust storms.

They lived their lives on a family farm. That is a phrase that brings a feeling of nostalgia to people who have never lived on one. It is actually an institution which survives on unpaid child labor.

When World War II began, their three youngest children — my father along with his older and younger brothers — were ripe for the draft. The eldest of the three volunteered, my father was drafted, but given a brief deferment to get in my grandfather’s crops for that year, and the youngest was drafted as soon as he was old enough.

They all returned alive. Their military stories are worth telling, but at another time.

Back from the war, my father married quickly. My parent’s first house was a converted chicken coop. Before the great expansion of suburban housing began, anything that had four walls and a roof was fair game for returning GIs. My father bought a milk truck and drove a route for the next several years, saving his money and buying dairy cows, which he housed on his brother’s farm.

Forget a city milk delivery cart, drawn by a faithful horse. Forget the stainless steel behemoths that you see on today’s roads. In those days, milk was transported in 10 gallon cans which were stored on the farm in a frigid water bath. Each milk can, with contents, weighed about a hundred pounds. They were picked up daily from each farm by milkmen who hoisted all of them manually, one by one, out of the cold tank, carried them outside to their refrigerated truck, hoisted them by hand to the high bed, then drove the the next farm. When the load was complete, they drove them to Tulsa and unloaded them, still by hand. It was a brutal business. 

After four years my father sold the truck and we all moved to a house (you would call it a shack) on my uncle’s farm. It had no plumbing, just an outhouse, and our water came from a milkman like my father had been.  He picked up milk from my father’s and uncle’s combined herd every day. When he unloaded his truck, he rinsed out one of the milk cans and filled it with city water. The next day it came back with the empties; we placed it on the counter in the kitchen. It provided 10 gallons a day for all uses.

No one paid for the water and no one paid the milkman for bringing it back from town. It was just a kindness among people during hard times.

After four years of living on my uncle’s farm and growing crops on rented land, we moved again, this time to our own place. It wasn’t much, and it was rented, but we worked together to fix it up. I did what I could; I was seven.

When I was eleven, I started working every day, twice a day, in the dairy barn. That continued until I was nineteen and went off to college. I also spent every day of summer driving a tractor, as well as many days in spring and fall. I once calculated that in winter I worked the farm about 35 hours a week, and in summer, closer to 50.

About the time I started working, we bought the farm from its owner, with a bank loan of course.

For about eight years, my father had my full, free labor. By the time I was fourteen I could drive a tractor as well as anyone and I competed with grown men to prove I could carry as many sacks of grain or fertilizer as they could. 

That’s the way boys grow up on a farm. Childhood? I didn’t have much of one, but I didn’t feel particularly cheated. I was a man at fifteen, and that was enough.

Still, I wouldn’t do it again for a billion dollars.

I left the farm in 1966 and, for reasons having nothing to do with this post, I only returned for brief visits.

The Great American Lie is that if you work hard enough, you will succeed. My father sought success and won it, to a degree. That is the entrepreneurial part of my family story.

Things didn’t go quite as well after I left, and then his life of immense labor finally caught up with him. His health failed. He could no longer do the work it takes to run a working farm, and there was not enough income to hire someone to take his place. Or mine. He could no longer pay the bank loan.

The bank took the farm.

Bill Gates and Elon Musk notwithstanding, that is the normal end of a business, or a farm. It is especially true when the children want out.

After a life of work and sacrifice, everything is lost when a man’s strength runs out — a peasant from the middle ages would have understood the situation perfectly.

732. Rebecca Wasson

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O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of America is nearly upon us. Great things have been done by great people, but I always find myself more interested in those who never made the news, nor the history books. Edgar Lee Master’s must have felt the same way, to judge by his book of poems Spoon River Anthology.

The people that spoke from that town’s cemetery, through Master’s pen, a century ago, have a lot to say to the rest of us. I am particularly moved by Rebecca Wasson, a hundred years old, remembering in her quiet room, and waiting for her husband’s return, which can only come at her very end.

Rebecca Wasson

Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,
After each other drifting, past my window drifting
And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting
The years till a terror came in my heart at times,
With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last
My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay
Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle
And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!
Day after day alone in a room of the house
Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.
And by night, or looking out of the window by day
My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time
To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,
And John, my John, away to the war with the British,
And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.
And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois
Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,
Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.
O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!
And O my John!
Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,
Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?
Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered
When you found me in old Virginia after the war,
I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,
As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter
In the light of your face!

728. Wildlife in the Land of Fire

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Today is Wednesday, my regular posting day, June 3, 2026. Scheduled in eight hours was 728. Covers, promised last week.

Something timely has come up to shove it and the next few posts down the pipeline by a week. Two things actually, one benign and fun, the other a bit jarring.

I live in the foothills of the Sierras, at about the thousand foot elevation. It is the level that they call the heat zone. I once heard another resident say that where we live, even the rattlesnakes carry canteens. We moved here decades ago to get out of the crowded central valley.

It rains about twelve inches during the winter. Everything is green and lush while the Eastern states are under snow, but from May until October there is no rain. Not a drop. The grasses go brown-golden and crackle in the sun, like tinder.

We came here for the space and the wildlife. Buzzards circle every day. They are quite beautiful, since their odd red heads are hidden by altitude. Occasionally there are bald eagles circling with them, and often red tail hawks, crows, and geese.

On the ground, there are wild turkeys. A few years ago a flock came frequently to our place, to loll beneath the shade trees in the heat of summer. One year an injured adult stayed on our property all summer, recuperating, then disappeared in the fall.

Recently, turkeys have been scarce at our place, but a few days ago a new flock, three adults and about a dozen babies, started coming through. We’ve missed having a personal flock of turkeys.

That is the benign and fun thing. The other is fire — not benign and not fun.

Every summer there are fires, often large, often close by, sometimes on our doorstep. Yesterday, it happened again, and once again we dodged the bullet.

About two in the afternoon, I heard aircraft flying low overhead, and the phone rang with an evacuation alert. We jumped into the car, to be ready for a quick retreat. From the end of the driveway we could see a black cloud of smoke on the next road over. We drove around the twisting roads to visually triangulate the center, pulling off from time to time to let fire crews go by.

It was a small fire by California standards, but just the kind that can spread devastation measured in square miles if allowed to grow. There was a small spotter plane circling high overhead, a helicopter shuttling back and forth to a nearby lake to drop hundreds of gallons of water onto the fire and a larger plane divebombing loads of fire retardant between the flames and nearby houses. The retardant plane is what you see in the photo above.

That’s where I live — full of wildlife, beautiful, dangerous, and often quite lively. When I finish this post, I’ll drive over to see the details. All the roads into the area were closed off by fire crews yesterday.

As nearly as I can tell from Google Maps, the fire was about a half mile away.

723. Humanity

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Humanity

When it becomes too lonely to be “I”,
All the “I”s become “we”.
That is the beginning of culture.

Being “we” creates “them”.
That is the beginning of war

There were no blacks until white men created them.
They were just people of a darker complexion
on another continent, going about their lives.

Then they were captured,
bound, transported, and reborn in another land.
Abused, held down, tormented, and therefore feared.

Made into a new people.

It didn’t matter that they came from the Bushveld or Karoo,
The Swahili Coast or the Congo, Kalahari or Natal . . .
White people mashed all the Africans into one lump
and called them n—–.

We don’t use that word any more,
but we use the same thinking.

There were no Indians until the whites arrived.
No Native Americans, either.

(Native Americans!
Named after an arrogant map maker,
instead of a mistake made by an Italian
working for the Spanish
who never did know where he was.)

Before European explorers came
There were Apache and Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Dakota,
Hopi and Kickapoo, Kiowa and Mi’kmaq,
Osage and Paiute, Quapaw and Chippewa.

Hundreds of little groups, at war with one another.
Each the center of their own universe,
until they became one people in the eyes of the Europeans.

But that’s not all.

There were no Whites in Europe, either.
They didn’t become Whites until they reached America.

In Europe they were French and Polish,
Italian and Greek,
Russian and Romanian,
English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish,
Gypsies and Danes.

They hated each other,
They fought with each other, they killed each other.
There was no unity in Europe either.

“Unity” came everywhere
when the little groups became bigger groups,
usually against their will.

It happens on our side,
It happens on their side, too.
And then we fight.

Do we have to wait for the flying saucers to land,
and give us a common enemy?

Will it take that to force humans
to become humanity?

717. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part Two.

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Last week I said you should buy a copy of Flint, by Lous L’Amour, and have it in hand as I take you through the first five pages. I have left out more than I have provided, so you need the original. Don’t read this and think you have read L’Amour. Now let’s begin —

Flint, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1-3  =>  It is given to few people in this world to disappear twice but, as he had succeeded once, the man known as James T. Kettleman was about to make his second attempt.

If he did not succeed this time he would never know it, for he would be dead.

When a man has but a few months to live, he can, if he so wills, choose the manner of his going, and Kettleman had made such a choice. He was now on his way to a place of which he alone knew, and there he would die. He would die as he had lived — alone.

If that doesn’t grab you by the lapels, I don’t know what it would take.

Be sure to read the paragraphs I don’t provide. The ones I am giving you are just landmarks.

Paragraph 6 => There were five people in the car. The lights were dim, the passengers lay sprawled in uncomfortable sleep. The train rushed westward through the cold, clear night, carrying the man steadily toward his final destination.

First who he is, now where he is. Next we will get a glimpse of his love interest and his antagonist, both of who will appear later in the novel. Read on . . .

Paragraph 10-14 => The country outside was invisible. The windows had steamed over, and the train moved as if through an endless tunnel.     (I am trying to maintain the letter and spirit of the copyright laws, which allow short excerpts, so you will have to have a copy of Flint to read the longer sections.)

Now we know where he is going, and that the place is intimately familiar to him. If you are a fan of the genre, you also know that it is a place you want to spend the next few hours. In a different genre, it would be different place.

Paragraph 15-23 =>      Next in your copy, but too long to reproduce in this post, is the essential flashback that establishes Flint’s deep background. This gunfight is a classic of the genre, but it is told briefly since it exists to establish character and motivation. There will be other gunfights to bring the book to its necessary conclusion. This is a Western, after all.

In another genre, say a romance, this might be be an early or failed romance to set up THE ONE in the closing pages.

Paragraph 24 => In the instant of silence that followed the shooting they heard the click of a drawn-back gun hammer, and every head turned. “He was my friend,” the youngster said, and he started shooting.

This is a triple set-up. First it establishes Flint’s relationship to the man who is killed. This will be fleshed out later in the novel. It also shows Flint’s gun skills, and finally it sets-up an essential mistake of identity, when “Kettleman” is later thought to be the legendary hired killer Flint.

Paragraph 27-28 => The train whistled, the lonely sound trailing off across the wind-swept plains. Kettleman got out his pipe and lighted it. His two bags and haversack were at the back of the car. When he opened that door there would be a moment when the cold air might awaken the others, but he would be gone.

Up to a point he had planned every move, but once arrived at Flint’s old hideout there would be nothing to do but wait. Some time ago his doctor had told him he would not live a year, and most of that year had passed.

The next five paragraphs are skipped just to speed the process. Of course you will read them in that novel in your other hand.

Paragraph 33-34 => There had been more than fifteen hundred dollars in Flint’s pockets when he died on that rain soaked Kansas hillside, following the shooting at The Crossing. The boy who was to become James T. Kettleman had sixty dollars of his own, which he used to buy an outfit of store clothes in Kansas City.

He travelled to New York City and sold his four horses for an additional four hundred dollars. With this stake he started in business. It was more money than either Jay Gould or Russel Sage had started with.

Again, some paragraphs are skipped.

Paragraph 41 => In the fifteen years following that night at The Crossing he had built his small stake into many millions, making many enemies and no friends in the process. He married a wife who tried to have him killed, and had no children.

That last sentence is a masterpiece of brevity. It tells a little, but leaves volumes unsaid. It leaves us dying to know more about this woman. When she shows up more than half-way through the book, we will find that she has been worth waiting for.

Paragraph 43 => Thirty years earlier, when he was two years old, he had been picked from the brush near a burned wagon train, where he had been overlooked by raiding Comanches. There were no other survivors. Nothing remained to tell who he was, and those who found him had no interest in learning. During the next four years he was handed around from family to family and finally abandoned on a cold night in a one-street Western town.

Having established Flint as a youth and as a grown man, L’Amour finally tells us about the very early life which set him on his path.

Paragraph 47-49 => The dry grass bent before the wind, and seed pods rattled in the brush along the right of way.

James T. Kettleman was ended, and the man who had borne that name, making it feared and respected, stood now where he had stood so many years before, without a name. He was now a man without a past as he had been a boy without one.

“Good-by,” he said, but there was nobody to say the word to, and nothing to remember.

<< == >>

So now we are five pages into the novel. I dare you — or any reader — to stop now.

There is a lot to be learned in these few pages about grabbing your readers, whether you like Westerns or not. And if you didn’t get a copy of Flint to read, causing you to miss 90% of what the rest of us learned, aren’t you sorry now?

Of course you can still go get a copy. This post will still be here. Just type Syd Logsdon 716. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part 2 into your browser.

716. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part One.

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Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Bible starts that way but you shouldn’t. When I say that, I am assuming that your are or want to be a writer.

The days of beginning at the beginning of a story passed a couple of centuries ago. Now we begin in medias res, which is Latin for in the middle of things. Then we fill in with flashbacks, as needed.

It’s quite an art, and it is often done badly.

In a recent Christmas movie, two young women were standing on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. One said, “I can’t believe I still get nervous before a live show.” The other replied, “You’re Suzie Smith, country western star, and I’m your manager. You’ve got this!”

Awkward, awkward, awkward.

You need to get your story going at full speed, then introduce the necessary background early so your reader or viewer doesn’t close the book or change the channel before being properly hooked. It’s a skill that takes time to master.

AI devours ten thousand reports in order to learn how to produce one report. Writers read a thousand novels before they are ready to write one, starting it in medias res. I am about to offer you a novel that should be on your list.

The novel is Flint, by Lous L’Amour. It doesn’t matter if you are a fan of westerns or not, this is business. You can learn from any genre, and this novel is a masterpiece at grabbing the reader by the lapels in the first sentence and never letting him escape.

In the first five pages, L’Amour introduces his character, paints a compelling picture of his surroundings, tells you that his character is dying (he isn’t, but he thinks he is), shows the girl who will later be his love interest, as well as the man who will be his future enemy, tells Flint’s origin story (it’s a good one), tells the story of his life so far, and introduces the woman (who happens to be his wife) who will bring him no end of misery.

But here is a twist. Before I tell more, I’m going to give you a homework assignment.

You can buy Flint in many new bookstores, in many used bookstores, or you can go to Amazon and find it new, used, as kindle, or as an audiobook. Get a copy and have it handy on March 11th. Then I will walk through the first five pages with you.

I can’t compress five novel pages into one of these posts, and it would probably be illegal anyway. Also, I’m not ChatGPT. If I am going to use another author’s novel, I will expect him (or his estate) to get at least a few pennies.

Of course, you may be reading this post years from now. The same rules apply. Get a copy of Flint and then go to the March 11, 2026 post.

Join me next week, same time, same place,
with a copy of Flint in your hand.

715. Pettus Bridge, a fable

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Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman. Unfortunately, she was black, enslaved, and living in Alabama. The year was 1815.

Her owner was just back from fighting beside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. He was a hero.

His wife didn’t think so. She had been running the plantation all the time he was gone. She hadn’t enjoyed that, but she enjoyed having him home again even less. In bed, he was quick and crude, and after three weeks his wife moved into a different bedroom.

A week later, he found the lovely young black woman in the fields. He ordered her to take off her clothes and lie down on her back in the shade of a tree. Ten minutes later he was on his way again.

Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Nineteen years later, the hero’s son caught the daughter in the fields and did the same thing to her that his father had done to her mother. Nine months later, another lovely black girl-child was born, but now things had changed.

The plantation was failing. The hero’s son had become too fat to chase women, even slave women, and too drunk most of the time to miss the chase. The plantation was sold, the slaves were broken up and scattered. The girl-child stayed with her mother a few years, then was sold to a plantation south of Birmingham. When she turned seventeen, she was sold to a brothel.

When she was twenty-four, she gave birth to twins — but not identicals. One she named Flo; it had been her mother’s name. The other she named Cécile, since the father had been a Frenchman. She thought so, anyway.

The blood of Cécile’s white father, and grandfather, and great grandfather were strong in her makeup. He nose was small, her skin was pale, She would be a great addition to the brothel when she grew up. Flo had inherited the other side of the genetic lottery.

Both would remain slaves. Both were black, Cécile’s white looks notwithstanding, since the doctrine of that day was the one drop of blood was all it took to make you black.

Little Cécile was a favorite of all the men who came to the brothel. When her head was only up to their elbows, she had already learned how to lean against them, smile up at them, and laugh like she didn’t have a care. She earned coins that way and she kept them hidden. She listened to what they talked about as they waited their turn upstairs, and she remembered. She stored everything away in her finely tuned mind and she planned. She learned about Birmingham, but more importantly she learned about Memphis from a traveler who came often. Soon she knew all the street names, where blacks lived, and where they didn’t.

When she was fifteen, she ran away. Two months later, she was in Memphis. Her name was Celia, now. Celia White, because she had a sense of humor. Her name was White, and she was white, because she was intelligent enough to know that that was the only way to survive. Her husband never knew. Her children never knew.

Celia had eight children. Every time a child was born, she was in mortal fear that the child would have dark skin and kinky hair, but it never happened. When one of Celia’s grandsons had a black appearing child, he beat his wife for her infidelity, since the child clearly could not be his. Celia said nothing.

When Celia was 53, her husband moved to Selma, Alabama. Within a year most of the children and grandchildren had followed. Now Celia was only seventeen miles from the town that held the brothel where she had been born. She said nothing.

Celia’s mother was emancipated in 1865, but Celia never contacted her.

Celia had emancipated herself already. While the others traded slavery for Jim Crow, Celia had made herself white. Her emancipation was real, and she had no intention of jeopardizing it.

Celia live to be 71. They buried her in Selma, in a cemetery that black folks couldn’t use — but she did.

She had eight children, forty-seven grandchildren, and one hundred six great-grandchildren. Most of them remained in and around Selma, and many went into law enforcement.

In 1965, Celia would have been 116 if she had lived that long. She never saw her mother again after she ran away from the brothel. She never saw her twin, Flo, either. For most of Celia’s life, Flo was alive and in the area, having children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, just like Celia, but they never met again.

On March 7, 1965 near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Celia’s great-grandchildren, thinking they were white, brutally attacked Flo’s great-grandchildren who knew that they were black and always would be.

Behold, America, clubbing itself to death over the myth of race.

709. Redneck Granny

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Here is my redneck Granny, who died long before the original of this was posted. I’m sure she would hate everything I have said here, but I love her anyway.

Redneck Granny

I started this blog late in 2015. When Black History Month rolled around in 2016, I had a lot to say — enough to fill the month with posts. This, somewhat modified, was one of them.

— << >> —

The first African slaves arrived in America about 400 years ago. If we count twenty-five years as a generation, that’s 16 generations.

Let’s look at the typical American today. He or she had two parents and they had four parents between them, and their parents had eight parents between them. And so forth. Up the line sixteen generations, that’s 32,768 direct ancestors. If you don’t believe me, do the math.

All those ancestors sent DNA down the line to make our average American. What are the chances that not one packet of DNA was out of Africa? What are the chances that there weren’t a lot more than one out of Africa in his/her lineage?

You might think whites didn’t mix with blacks in the olden days, but are you sure? Are you counting all the times when a white man was in charge, and a black woman didn’t have any say in the matter? They wouldn’t even have called it rape in 1619. Nor 1719. Nor 1819. In a lot of places they wouldn’t have called it rape in 1919. 2019 — maybe.

So much for black purity, but that isn’t any big secret. What about white purity?

How white do you have to look to pass for white? Three quarters? Seven eighths? How many generations does that take? Not many.

Now what are the chances that a whitish, black female would claim to be white if she could? Or a whitish, black male? Forget the twenty-first century when African-Americans are proud of what they are. Project your thinking back to when being white meant being free, and being black meant being a slave. Wouldn’t you pass for white, if you could get away with it?

I would. Some of my (and your) ancestors probably did.

More math. Lets say that by 1700 (eighty years into the era of American slavery, thirteen generations ago), one hundred partially negro girls could and did pass for white. That’s not a big number to surmise. In fact, it’s ridiculously small.

Let’s give doubters no excuse for their doubts. Let’s say that these passing girls only averaged two children who went on to have children. That’s certainly a minimal estimation. Their descendants are boys and girls who would disappear into the white gene pool.

That’s 408,000 offspring after 13 generations. Which is to say, in 2025.

Wow. And after a couple of generations, if Mom kept her mouth shut, none of them would know they were passing. They would believe they were white.

That doesn’t cover all the other blacks, male and female, who passed in the last four hundred years. That is only one hundred, starting in 1700. But there weren’t just a hundred, they didn’t start in 1700, and they haven’t stopped to this day.

There is one big change in the twenty-first century. People who are light skinned and could call themselves white, now often identify as black. It’s probably confusing for “white” folks who haven’t thought it through.

I don’t think it confuses “black” folks at all.

If math doesn’t impress you, if you think numbers lie, then let’s make it personal.

Rhett Butler was partly black. Scarlet O’Hara was partly black. Simon Legree was partly black.

You’re partly black. I’m partly black. And my Oklahoma relatives just disowned me.

That’s mighty white of them.

— << >> —

This was a modified version of a post from February 3, 2016. If you are wondering why this old “white” guy is so concerned with black identity, it is all a matter of upbringing. In my case, that means being raised on the edge of the South in the fifties in a culture that didn’t exactly hate blacks, but didn’t much like them either. My people fully believed in the separation of the races; the only good black was somebody who lived someplace else.

The problem with the community viewpoint was television. On the six o’clock news I saw black people being washed down the sidewalk by firehoses because they were marching for the right to be human.

They were right. We were wrong. Hardly anybody in my town got that message, but I did.

I escaped to college, where I studied Anthropology and got an extended view of what British imperialism had done to the black and brown people of the world.

Then I studied History, where I found out that English imperialism had been just as harmful to the ruddy-faced and red-haired poor in Scotland and Ireland. I also found out what white America had done to the Native Americans, the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and even the Irish.

In California, where I now live, white incomers from the east now discriminate against the Latinos, who owned California after they took it away from the California Indians, and before the white east-coast Americans took it away from them.

Over the years I wrote about all of those displaced and disadvantage peoples in my blog and now that has all been gathered together for publication.

Originally I planned to call the book . . .

Your Redneck Granny is a Black Woman, and she doesn’t even know it

I had kept that provocative phrase in my back pocket for years, but when it came to reality, the title . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a secret

. . . seemed more likely to make a prospective reader curious enough to pick up the book.

I originally wanted to publish it early in 2026, but the five novels of the Menhir Series will take the whole year to release. Instead Redneck Granny is planned for release on January 20, 2027, just about a year from today. Keep it in mind and tell your friends.

706. Five Years Ago

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Even though Trump just “took over” Venezuela, that isn’t what I want to talk about. That story is still unfolding and full of unknowns, but there is no confusion about what happened five years ago.

January sixth — you can’t say that any more without special meaning. It has become a time-bound phrase, as specific as 9/11.

January sixth came five years ago. No doubt every newspaper and television journalist will have something to say today. Me, too. It’s personal; it should be personal to every American.

I saw it all on television, starting at nine on the west coast. This posting will match that time. At first it seemed to be only another address by the outgoing crazy. Then Trump called on the crowd to “fight like hell”, and they did.

I saw it all as it happened. From the moment it became apparent that there was going to be trouble, continuing until the crowd dispersed, I never left the broadcast.

Even if you were elsewhere that day, everybody knows about the attack. Unfortunately, not everybody understands that the attack happened entirely because Trump lied.

Trump had lost the 2020 election. He refused to acknowledge that fact. He instituted multiple lawsuits against the result, and lost them all.

He called for a rally. He stoked the crowd. He sent them to march and told them to fight in order to keep the Congress from ratifying the vote.

Trump orchestrated and authorized the horrors that followed. There is only one word to describe his actions.

Treason.

Trump is responsible for his words and his deeds, despite the subsequent findings of the Supreme Court which ended attempts to bring him to justice.

Trump ran again four years later, and won a second term. He continued to lie and continued to be believed, but he did not win without help.

The gatekeepers who kept the American people from knowing of Biden’s decline have to share the blame for Trump’s return. When Biden came on stage at the June 24, 2024 Presidential debate, clearly inadequate to his task, the election was already lost before he ever opened his mouth.

And now Trump is back with a vengeance.

These are dark days. They must not continue. 2026 is our best chance to return to reason. It may be our last chance.