a personal account on how I became a secondary player in the writing game:

IT WAS WITH A MINOR AMOUNT OF HUMILITY...

AND A LARGE AMOUNT OF ARROGANCE WHEN I first began to believe that I belonged in the writing trade.  The year was 1981 and I was 45 years-old, living with a girl named Barbara in Houston, Texas after my divorce.  I had no idea why I wanted to learn the newspaper business, but I did.  An acquaintance of ours was a man named Blaze Ryder, who was an editor at a weekly newspaper called This Week in Texas, largely written for a gay audience in the Montrose area of Houston.  I asked him one morning over coffee with Barbara at  Avalon Drug Store if I could do some writing for the paper even though I had no experience.  You do know that if I hire you, you'll be the only straight guy one the staff and that the rest of us 'are more than a little-light-in-the-loafers? he said.  I do, I replied, but I need to learn the rhythms of writing a good story.  Blaze made the decision to take a chance on me and put me under his wing on a temporary basis.  My teacher wasn't Blaze because for the first couple of months I worked nights and he worked days and we seldom saw one another.  


    I began working with another reporter by the name of Max Little whose name I thought was quite appropriate since he was only a little over 5 feet tall and wore and well-waxed handlebar mustache on his upper lip which seemed to be as long as he was tall.  He had once been a reporter for The New York Daily News, retired, moved to Houston, and began to write for This Week in Texas at the age of 71 just to keep 'his hand in the game,' he said.  Max shook my hand when we were introduced and said, The first thing you need to know about me is that I like to fart in public because I get a real kick out of seeing the look on people's faces. 

     Max covered the Montrose and informed me that at the age of 45 I had started late and therefore had to hurl myself into the work - and his work was covering the crimes committed against gays in the Montrose and Heights areas of Houston.  He quickly taught me that at the heart of every story there was a bald fact or two.  Here's how you write a good story, he told me one evening over dinner at a restaurant called Baba Yega on Pacific Street.  Let's say that the body of some guy is lying dead in front of a bar or in an alley dumpster.  The body can be measured and weighed by the cops, but your job as a reporter is to look for scars, tattoos, and anything else you can spot that can tell you who this guy was.  Always ask a cop after you identify yourself if you can look through the dead man's wallet which will reveal the facts of his identity: a name, and address, an age, his bank, the number on his driver's license, and if the cop says 'No,' you somehow find out who he is and where he lived, hustle over to his neighbors, add a few more small facts about his life and and ask them who they thought he was.  Then your work begins.    The facts can't record the dead man's thoughts, or his dreams, desires, confusions and ambiguities.  They can't explain the meaning of his life.  That part of the job will be up to you because you are the one who has to tell the reader why he will be missed or if he was a scumbag why he deserved to die.


      At about eight o'clock in the evening Max dropped me off back at the newspaper office on West Dallas Street and introduced me to the assistant night editor, a man by the name of Kit Kramer, younger than I was by a few years.  Frank departed and Kit parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had.  When I told him none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals.  I would write on 'books,' 4 sheets of paper separated by carbons.  The carbon copies were called 'dupes.'  In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a 'slug,' a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters.  The slug should represent the subject; a political story would be slugged POLS.  But if it was a murder story I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story. 


     With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite 2 paragraphs, and my career had begun.  I sat in the sparsely manned city room the for several nights thereafter, I wrote small stories based on press releases from the early editions of the morning paper.  I noticed that Kit had Scotch-taped three words word to his own typewriter: Illuminate and clarify.  I appropriated it as my motto.  My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself on a nightly basis: What does this story say?  What is new?  How would I tell it to my daughter and son?  Illuminate and clarify, I whispered to myself.  Illuminate and clarify...Near dawn, there was a lull as the night editors discussed what they would to with all the material they now had in type.  One evening, when I turned around, Blaze Ryder was walking into the room.

      He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the room to a fenced-off pen at the far back, with red cowboy boots, carrying copies of The Houston Post and Houston Chronicle under his arm.  I watched him go to his desk, light a Marlboro cigarette, watched as he shoved his horn-rimmed glasses to the top of his head as he began reading.  He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick red pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad.  Then he moved to the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on a stone-topped table.  He was still there when my shift ended and Max Little gave me a goodnight.  As I was leaving I asked Max, Does Blaze ever talk to anyone when he comes in?  Max replied with a grin, Only if you fuck-up.

     In the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and muggings and murders, knocking on doors in Montrose and the Heights at 2 in the morning.  I came to understand that the newspaper I was now working for was a staple in the life of the homosexual community: to them it was a tough ballsy tabloid with a liberal political soul which pressed for coverage of civil rights and the reform of the police department who continued to harass the community along the much traveled Westheimer Drive.  They didn't much like the negative publicity and Blaze didn't seem to care whether they liked it or not.  Rumor had it, however, that the newspaper wouldn't last past New Year's due to the pressure from the police and local politicians.


     The uncertainty about the paper's future didn't bother me.  If the newspaper did go down I wouldn't starve.  But in the meantime, I was having the best time of my life.  I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade.  During my initial tryout as a newspaper reporter, I watched Max and got to know other newspapermen up close.  I loved their talk, cynicism and fatalism, and brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched businessmen coming in and out; obviously hiding the fact that they were 'in the closet.' I had become friends with an immense, burly, bald copy editor named Myer Radmacher.  Myer was funny and merciless.  He had once 'been 'in the closet' himself and knew about the fear of being found-out.  He said that he had denied himself a full and happy life and went on pretending to be something other than who he actually was, and he believed that most of the human race were 'obviously perverse' when it came to the understanding of human sexuality.

     Then one stormy morning, after I had written a story about the owner of a lesbian bar having been beaten by the cops as she walked to her car, and was about to go home for the day, Blaze called me over.  He held the galley in his hand.  I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.  Not bad, he said.  Thanks, I replied.   By the way, I had coffee with Barbara this morning.  I understand you now have your daughter living with you. How old is she?  Sixteen, I said.  And your former wife kicked her out of the house?  he asked.  She did, I replied.  Because she found out that your daughter is gay, correct?  I nodded.  How did you feel about that?  I replied, Fine.  I want my daughter to be happy and feel safe.  I really don't give a damn about who she is sleeping with.

     He lit a Marlboro.

     I was hoping you would say that.  I want you to do a series of stories, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping his coffee.  But I need to ask something else and I want you to be honest with me, OK?  OK, I said.  Tell me the truth about your feelings with regard to homosexuality outside of your own family.  Are you prejudiced?  I gave a small smile, Iffy is more like it, I replied.  Sometimes its hard. being a a straight guy trying to get used to guys like you.  I feel like I'm a fish-out-of-the-water.  He took another drag on his cigarette and laughed.  You're getting good at this miserable trade, Daugs.  What I'd like you to do is this: write a series of articles called 'The Bending of a Straight' as you make your way through our community and get to know us better.  Will you do that for me?  Sure, I said and started to leave.  Oh, by the way, Blaze said.  You're hired.  


     After I was hired, I brought my sense of entitlement as a member of the working press every week with my series 'The Bending of a Straight' and made my way through the Montrose and Heights into bars and restaurants, on the street and in homes.  I couldn't wait to go to sleep so I could wake up and do it all over again and eventually won 'The Writer of the Year Award.'  I was now on my way to finding my own language, style, tone and rhythm.  The facts were still the core of the work, of course, but in the column form I was able to express my own feelings or ideas about those facts.  From the beginning, the form felt natural to me; I was like a musician who had finally discovered an instrument that was right for me.  Shortly thereafter, the newspaper went bust due to the political pressure exerted by the Republican City Council.  


     S0 I decided to expand the genre of my writing by attempting to write for the theater and became a member of a play write symposium at a place called Stages Theater on Allen Parkway, where my daughter Traci had once been the youngest member of the acting company until she moved to New York City to establish her acting career, and was led by a director by the name of Ted Swindley, who had been with The Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago and decided to create his own theater company in Houston.

     Like so many journalists turn to writing novels, I chose to write a stage play to get at the truths beyond the facts about ourselves and others.  If reporters stick around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the things, as the philosopher said, ain't what they seem to be, nor are people.  So I plunged into an imaginary tale about a man wanting to commit suicide because a lost love had dumped him.  He is saved from doing the dastardly deed by two imaginary characters who appear in his bathroom as he is about to hang himself on the shower curtain rod.  One man seems to be Godlike who goes by the name of Godberg.  The other is an African American gay fellow who calls himself 'O.F.' which stands for 'The Old Fairy.,'   The man the two of them are about to save is a guy by the name of Kismir Wunderlick.  I gave the play the simple title of: Wunderlick; and it went on to win the Best Play Award in The Texas Playwright Festival in 1986.

     After my win earlier in the year, I moved to the City of New York in September of 1986 when I came home one Friday afternoon and saw Barbara happily  bouncing up-and-down in bed atop my best friend Robert, who seemed to be enjoying himself until he looked up and saw me and had to run naked out of the house with me giving chase.  Shortly thereafter, I joined my daughter and shared an apartment with her on East Thirty-Sixth Street,retained a temporary job as an associate editor at Conde Nast in the World Trade Center from  9-to-5, and writing plays at night.  My daughter began getting acting roles in Grand Theft Auto and the Lost and the Dammed, a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns, as well as guest spots on Law and Order and Law and Order Criminal Intent, while establishing a career as a Voice Over Artist.  By then, I was busy by splitting my time writing book covers for Random House on East 50th Street in the morning, writing for a business magazine called The Weekly Business Report on West  Fifty-seventh in the afternoon, while teaching writing at a two-year college on West Fifty-sixth by the name of Interboro Institute in the evening.  

   It was not until 1989 when I eventually had another play produced in The East London Playwright Festival and at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street's Theater Row called 'Miles to Go.' It was based upon a true story of a woman that I once knew who happened to be the former wife of a salesman for the race car driver A.J. Foyt   who had  won the Indianapolis 500 four times and now had a Chevrolet dealership in Houston.  While I was interviewing Foyt he mentioned the salesman and thought it might make a good story for an article since she was about to go trial for murder .  It turned out that she was accused of gunning down her second husband while he lay asleep on their bed, dismembering him into 5 pieces out in the garage, gingerly placing his earthly remains into an equal number of garbage bags while her 2 children ate dinner in the kitchen, called her first husband on the phone who happened to be the father of her 2 children, asked him if he could take care of the kids a for a couple of days, then hauled the  body parts of husband number 2 out to California in the trunk of corpse's Cadillac in the hope that her father would help her dispose of his remains.  She was arrested when her father ratted-her-out, was immediately sent back to Houston to stand trial, then found innocent due to the fact that her lawyer had convinced the jury that she had committed the crime while suffering from disassociate amnesia and was unaware of what she had done.  It got rave reviews in the October edition of The New York Magazine.

      I then wrote a book titled The Golden Years which  was published by the Golden Apple Press out of Toronto, Canada; and had reached a point in my life where I wrote every day, seven days a week.  When I went a day or so without writing, my body ached with anxiety, my mood became irritable, my dreams grew wild with unconscious invention.  Because I had written journalism and stage plays, I followed no set routine.  Struggling writing plays, I'd spent months at my desk, a bore to those who surrounded me, friends and family alike.  By now I had spent hours in libraries or newspaper morgues, worked in parked cars, in hotel lobbies, written on yellow pads and restaurant menus, and in the back rooms of bars, too.  I had started on typewriters and now used a computer.  Each day I learned something new and was humbled by the difficult standards of my trade.      

     After I departed the City of New York for life in Brentwood, California in 1999, I began to write a weekly column for a newspaper called The Brentwood Press.  Writing for The Brentwood Press which allowed me to practice my trade for 13 more years.  In a way these articles made up kind of a public diary, a recording of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way.  I was allowed to choose my own subjects and wrote in a meandering unplanned way about the events of Nine-eleven and my daughter's battle with multiple sclerosis, and was fortunate enough to win writing awards for both; and thankful when my daughter began to win the battle against the dreaded disease.  I began to make connections among a variety of other subjects.  I often chose subjects about which I knew nothing.  I wrote about a homegrown fascist and the blues and investment banking and the history of Sparta.  I had finally learned that as a writer specialization had no attraction for me; it would be like spending a lifetime painting only tulips.  I wanted to be, and am, a generalist.  One who eventually learned how to fit what I had learned into 700 words and hope to heaven that I gotten it right.

     It will be two-years in May when I first began my blog and the product of that ambition was the attempt to look back upon my own life.  In each of them, I first wanted to know something about what made me who I am, a place, an event, or an idea recalled in my own memory-bank.  I wanted to hear the music of my life.  I then wanted to pass on what I'd learned to others, looking back at many of them for the first time in a number of years.  I remembered who I was when I lived them, the houses I inhabited, the people I loved, my large stupidities and minor triumphs, and yes, reliving the memory of the life that I have lived through the written word......

     ...Both before and after I had become a secondary player in the writing game...

a brief history of the Cruz crawl upward through the muck of political slime:


'The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist
by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather
than charming, and seeks to be feared rather
than loved.  To this type belong many  lunatics.'
Bertrand Russell


THESE DAYS THE CULTURE OF THE INSANE AND BITTER CYNIC IS,...
OF COURSE, BEST OBSERVED IN WASHINGTON WHERE WE SEE that the fratricide of failure to compromise unleashing the darkest, most draconian measures of political posturing.  This historically began after 1890 when we became populated in huge numbers of Europeans who were different from the original British settlers.  They were Catholics and Jewish, they often spoke languages other than English or were illiterate farmers.  In one large country, they joined the survivors of the slaughter of the Indians, liberated slaves, and conquered Mexicans. To meld them into a unified nation required immense efforts of compromise and mediation on the part of all agents of the state.  The greatest task was to make the idealism of the Constitution real for every citizen.  Along the way newcomers faced unaccountable social offenses, riots, and the horror of the Civil War.  But slowly, decent, intelligent men and women created a living nation from the abstract principles of the state.  It all seemed to be working out rather well.


     Until the dawn of the twentieth-century that is, when our political style allowed asinine half-baked hair-brains to trample about  on the political scene.  Folks with names like Warren G. Harding and Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms and Richard Milhous Nixon began to appear; along with equally ignorant reporters chasing around after Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, various state troopers, Paula Jones, and God knows what else.  Millions were spent on attack ads and those who been bought-off refused to join the process of compromise.  The political world was now safe for the lobbyists and cynics and Voter Suppression and refusal to allow women equal rights in terms of equal pay and protection of their own bodies.


    Reflex replaced thoughtful analysis.  Slashing and lacerating language were now present on the Congressional and Senate floors, all of which were now employed against our new president by fellows with names like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and and the ever-stupid Louie Gohmert as well as the less-than-intelligent Sarah Palin.  The tone was sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental.  Facts no longer mattered.  Lies were told.  Compromise disappeared.  The professional politician now demanded the intolerant call of: Destroy The Affordable Care Act became the prime example of the process, and on a lesser scale: Death Panels and Birther Issues.   The era of respect for the Presidency was behind us, perhaps forever.  The implication was clear: There were no allegations that  our President was not a good-and-decent man, no issues of promiscuity on his part, most admired his family, but there must be something.  Aha!  The Son-of-a-bitch is Black!


     In a spirit of mindless destruction on our political Right,  whether they admitted it or not, was filled with bigots and racial incoherence became the norm in rather bizarre ways: the enemies of the president must maintain an adversarial stance without mentioning race, and swerve from truth to mere innuendo, and who better could be called upon to do that in a warble of implications of disaster but with a venomous tone other than the ever-annoying Donald Trump?  The publicity hound and serial candidate felt left out so he stepped up to the plate by announcing that he was, once again, thinking about running for the Presidency himself and reassured us that he was still on the hunt for our President's birth certificate.  All of which which happened to be on the exact same day that John Boehner invited Prime Minister 'Bibi' Netanyahu to speak to Congress behind the President's back and John McCain announced that the President's priorities were: All screwed-up.


     What mattered most to each one of them was to undermine the President.


     The continuation of this endless and somewhat disguised racial slaughter then came with the refusal to move the nomination forward of Loretta Lynch as our new Attorney General which, of course, had nothing at all to do with race, according to Mitch McConnell.  The "invisible attack" then ramped-up with the Iowa Senator Steve King adding that his feeling was that our President was "an anti-Semite" who hated the Jews.  The cheerleaders were having a heyday of political football filled with lies and innuendo, along with the essential element of the ever-present sneer, and the assurance of the asinine Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert that, In case our government runs amok, the guns are here, the Second Amendment is here, to make sure that all the rest of the amendments are followed. 


     The gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies of the Far Right were then, once again, aided-and-abetted by another Texan with a somewhat less than sound state of mind who happened to be the recently elected Junior Senator from Texas by the name of Raphael Edward "Ted" Cruz, a highly educated headcase egomaniac of Cuban descent born in Alberta, Canada in December of 1970 and when his family moved to Katy, Texas went on to Princeton, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and became the longest-serving Solicitor General in Texas history prior to being elected as a United States Senator in 2012.

     Here was a guy who denied the existence of global warming, to which Kevin Tranburth, a leading scientist from The National Center of Atmospheric Research replied, Ted Cruz  is full of claptrap...absolute bunk!  And also caused fellow Republican Senator John McCain to call him a 'Whacko-Bird' when Cruz announced his certainty that the Secretary of Defense, a decorated war hero by the name of Chuck Hegel, was in actuality  a secret spy for North Korea.  He was not alone.  Other insane remarks came forth from members of 'The Bats in the Belfry Club of the Far-Right-Wing' from none other than Sarah Palin, who informed African-Americans that they did not know what the word 'Slavery' meant.  Adding with her disingenuous ever-present smile that, Thugs are getting athletic scholarships over more deserving white kids...As the unenlightened and intentionally  ignorant Senator from Texas continued to deny the existence of our planet becoming unlivable due to global warming and our failure to preserve it through science and common sense.


     Cruz and his crowd of newly-minted Tea Party Congressmen now began to swing their broadswords of racism and ideology in earnest.  Indifferent to public opinion or a desire for consensus, naked power became commonplace against the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the pornographers and the liberals all of which was done in the thrall of a worldview of of a White's Only America for the powerful and rich.  Simple-minded insanity  was now the name of the political game.  When it came to Iran negotiation was out and war was  in.  When it came to women abortion was a no-no and unwanted pregnancy became  the thing to do even if you had been raped.    All political  discourse on an adult level was far too complicated because they were unable to understand difficult or complicated ideas   - so they used naked power to get their way; and Damn the consequences, full-speed-ahead !


     What chance does Obama have against the ever growing tide malevolence and antipathy tossed his way because of the color of his skin?  Domestically, he was indicted for being too liberal or too conservative or too socialist, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to the wants and needs and desires of Congress.  In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics wanted only to go to war and what patriotic American would refuse to do that?  After all, we're not even certain that he actually is an American.  What we need to do is multiply through division. It's not the time to honor good taste.  It's time to use deceit and double-dealing deception in order to get our way.


     There are human reasons for this.  The most effective men and women who could do so no longer run for office.   Many cannot afford to do so.  Others are unwilling to place themselves in the arena of continuous scrutiny of the American press where no rumor, innuendo, or allegation of promiscuity goes unprinted.  Alleged men and women of God then crawled up through the political ranks to draw the average American into a world of untruths disguised as patriotism because men and women who are intelligent and willing to compromise, those who do not even think about destroying the enemy, refused to enter the political fray.


     Instead, we have Senator Ted Cruz from Texas announcing that he is going to run for the office of the Presidency, a man of immense vanity  who peddles bromides filled with nonsense instead of intelligent discourse, and does so from the mega-church and university called Liberty where Jerry Falwell once peddled videos that virtually accused President Clinton of murdering Vincent Foster.  Senator Ted, a man of reflex rather than thought and analysis is the one who once said from the floor of the Senate as he was about to cause the shut-down of the United States Government...I will credit my father... he invented green eggs and ham...He did it two ways.  The easy way was he would put green food coloring in - but if you take spinach and mix it into the eggs the eggs turn green.  I do no like green eggs and ham.  I do not like them, Sam I am...


     ...Which proved the point that Samuel Beckett once made in the play Waiting for Godot: We are all born mad.  Some of us remain so.' 


     What fascinates me about this is that not so long ago most Americans would deem Cruz to be a sociopath unfit to hold office.  He has now risen through the political slime and through the muck of the right-wing agenda to become a major candidate for the office of the President of the United States.  Perhaps Jerry Brown the Governor of California said it best, 'That man betokens such a level of ignorance and direct falsification of scientific data.  It's shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.' 


     What kind of a guy is he?  You talk about double-speak:  It  seems to be one who lacks the courage of his theoretical convictions, in that now that he is running for the Presidency and his wife has taken a-leave-of-absence from her executive position at Goldman Sachs which has caused the loss of his family health-care plan, he has now signed-up for what he once insisted that he desired to completely abolish: The Affordable Care Act... 


     ...As Jenny Eclair so elegantly said, Sometimes the sight of a slug can bring up my breakfast...


     ...And all I can say to that is...


    ...Amen!

an angry old curmudgeon:


'Whenever I despair, I remember that the
way of truth and love has always won.
There may be tyrants and murderers,
and for a time, they may seem invincible,
but in the end, they will always fail...'
Mahatma Gandhi


'No one has supported President Bush
in Iraq more than I have...'
John McCain

BOTH HIS FATHER AND GRANDFATHER WERE 4 STAR ADMIRALS...

AND HE BECAME A NAVAL AVIATOR DURING THE VIETNAM WAR.  He was almost killed in the 1967 U.S. Forestall fire and while on a bombing mission over Hanoi he was shot down, seriously injured, captured by the North Vietnamese, and held as a prisoner of war until 1973.  He experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer and came home with war wounds that left him with physical limitations.  Once home, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives 1n 1982 and then became a member of the United States Senate in 1986, in 2000 he ran in the heated Presidential Primary and lost to George W. Bush, secured the Republican nomination in 2008 and lost to Barack Obama.  Along the way, he had been exonerated in a political influence scandal in the 1980s called the Keating Five and was lambasted by the press for having chosen a former Governor of Alaska as his running-mate in the Presidential race of 2008; and he had slowly devolved from being a military hero who somehow had now become a brooding old man, one willing to go to war with any nation on Earth.


     I begin to wonder how a man who once was a genuine hero who has experienced first-hand the dire cost of war; one who should have been taught that mindless anti-communism is not worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism was hardly a monolithic force.  Vietnam ought to have taught him that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, but McCain then became an advocate for the immediate use of military force in Iraq, and now wants to to do the same to Syria and ISIS, and any other nation which he determines needs to be blown-off the face of the Earth.  He should have learned that we can't talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right to obliterate innocent people in another country like Afghanistan only because they happen to live in a country where terrorists roam.  But above all else, as an American citizen and genuine war hero, he should have learned never again to place our trust in a President and Vice-President who led us into a war with lies about weapons of mass destruction which killed thousand of innocent people  and shed the blood of over four-thousand Americans; or never to trust the war making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.


     He and all Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they sought to have studied its history.  In Vietnam and then in Iraq, we Americans were deep in the swamp before we  started reading the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China; or discovered the long and complicated history of Iraq before it led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Afghanistan, the old mistakes became general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit.  There is no excuse for this anymore, of course.


     The literature on Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan grows daily, filling library shelves and bookstores.  The complete story of any war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists have little or no access to the other side, to the men and women and children of Vietnam, to those in Iraq who have endured so much misery and pain for so many years.  Until we offer a hand of friendship to the people we once defeated, we won't know it all.  This is now more than obvious with the current struggle in regard to Iran.  We don't even know all of the American part of the tragic tale which may lay ahead for all of the nations we have defeated in the name of war.


      But in the interim texts of war there are men like McCain and Cheney, military men, and ordinary citizens, who wish for us to experience more death and destruction.  Way back when we once read the Pentagon Papers, we saw the instinct for bureaucratic self-deception, the presentation of false options, the insistence on illusion in the face of facts, and have yet to understand the difference between genuine national pride and self-centered national vanity, then choose to settle for the fury, pain, and craziness of combat.  We've had books that have explored the shattering effect of war and those who fought it.  Our political leaders were too fearful to allow the caskets of our dead to be seen on our television sets, the truth of any war after World War Two became internalized, mythic, surrealistic, allusive; its darkest furies, deepest grief, and most brutal injuries became the problem of the poor kids whose parents could not afford to have them bought out  in the way that the rich did, who could afford for their children to be deferred and not deployed into combat.


     There are others who are not Americans, of course.  Men like the newly reelected Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu who wishes total destruction of the Palestinian State and the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khomeini who would like be armed with nuclear weapons if it becomes necessary to obliterate Israel.  The extraordinary thing is that men like this who make hard decisions in government do not seem to have read a  sentence of literature, or to have applied the lessons of history of the present world; and yet, everyone seems to want to have a go at war.


     I have an old friend by the name of Al Harms, who was also a naval aviator during the Vietnam War and would tell me tales about the beauty of the place.  Of flocking birds, white against the bottle-green hills.  Of how beautiful napalm can look exploding in orange flames across a dark hillside when seen from an airplane, along with the natural green beauty forever underlined by man-made damage he had just created; those blue and brown rain-filled pools which had been made by B-25s' and ghastly dead forests, created by Agent Orange.  But the worst thing he said he had witnessed were the bodies of men and women and children fried to death by the napalm being fired from his airplane, and of how the nightmares had forever remained with him from the memory of that scene.  He said that he was ashamed of himself for having volunteered to go off to fight that war.


      In the last conversation I had with Al by phone he said, I cannot understand why a genuine hero like John McCain would still have such a draconian taste for war after being in the same one I was in and confined to the 'Hanoi Hilton' as a prisoner of war.  A guy like Dick Cheney I can understand because he is nothing more than a despotic coward who got himself deferred over-and-over again.  But all I see from McCain on television is a permanent self-absorbed sneer accompanied by lacerating use of language when he confronts anyone who disagrees with him.  He has turned into an angry old man devoid of the courage he had when he was young...


     ...He then added, The best way I can define myself as opposed to McCain is in the words of Gandhi who said: 'I object to to violence when it appears to be good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent...'

a couple of  old gringos named Louie and Joe, who had once jumped ship while sailing with Jacques Cousteau:

FOR 40 YEARS NOW, I'VE BEEN GOING TO MEXICO...
AND I REMAINED A FOREIGNER, A MAN GOING ON the margin of Mexican life, until I met two old men who had jumped ship from a sloop called the Elie  Monnier owned by the famous Jacques  Cousteau off the coast of Acapulco back in 1948 and were now expatriates.  They were about to introduce me to the country of Mexico in a way that I never knew existed.


     It all began when I was in Acapulco in the summer of 1975 with a singles group from Houston known as The Leisure Tree shortly after my divorce.  I was walking alone early one morning in the old part of the city along the shores of Caleta Beach near The Hotel La Palapa where we were staying:  feeling a bit hungover from partying the night before in the hotel bar where we had listened to the usual international soft-rock pap, watered-down Beatles, creaky Barry Manilow, instead of the vibrant music of Mexico.  As I returned to the old part of the city, I was strolling down Avenue Cerro de San Martin filled with a number of art galleries, several antique shops, and stores selling Mexican folk art.  I was about to enter one of the galleries when I spotted a small restaurant across the street called The Lonely Gringo with a  large red-white-and-blue neon sign in the middle of the window that  read: 'Louie and Joe's: The Place for Burger and fries American Style.


      I opened the door and stepped inside the first thing I took note of were the photographs on either side of the wall: large Black-and-Whites of old movie stars like Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth and Heddy Lamar hanging on the left and on the right were equally large photos of Susan Hayward and Gene Tierney and Lauren Bacall.  At the far end of the room was a jukebox which was playing Love Will Keep Us Together with The Captain and Tennille.  The counter was made of polished  chrome with six red stools perched in front, across from the counter stood four tables with red-and-white checkered table clothes, surrounded with two chairs on either side.  Behind the counter was a older man with a somewhat grizzled-looking face in a white-apron over a yellow long-sleeved shirt wearing an old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap turned sideways on top of his head.  He looked up as I made my way to the counter and sat down on a stool as the the song on the jukebox came to an end.


     You realize this is just a hamburger joint, right? He asked.  I replied, Yes, Sir.  He said, My name's Louie.  Where are you from? Houston, I replied. He smiled.  I was in Houston once.  It's too god damned hot.  My brother Joe and I were originally from Greenleaf, Kansas.  We got the bug to go to sea about twenty-years after we graduated from high school, sold our farm and did just that.  We've  been here since'48.  What made you choose Mexico? I asked.  Didn't exactly choose, he replied.  We just  jumped ship and swam ashore. He handed me a menu.  Joe and I, we'd been in the Mediterranean after  hiring-on as deck hands with Jacques Cousteau and were on a sloop called 'Eli Monnier.'   I guess we got tired of being seasick and pewking all the time...He asked my name, took my order of a hamburger with fries and a strawberry malt, went into the kitchen behind the counter, began to cook, and then began to talk.  You been to Mexico before? he asked.  Several times, I replied.  Where? he asked.  Puerto Vallarta, Zihuatanejo, places like that, I replied.  You ought to give a shot at seeing the real Mexico instead of the fluff of the touristy stuff, he said.


     It was then that another man appeared entering through the rear door.  He wore a light brown Panama hat, a royal blue Polo shirt, J. Crew tan khakis and solid-white pair of Sperry Billfish boat shoes.  His face was lined by his years in the sun, his smile somewhat polite, he was holding a framed rather large painting in both of his hands,  kicked the door shut behind him, gave me a polite 'hello,' and set the painting into one of the chairs by one of the tables.  I heard Louie ask, Is that you, Joe?  The man said, It's me, Louie.  Who else do you think it would be?  I came in the back door. Who else does that?  You get the painting? Louie asked.  Joe replied, Yes.  The Rogelio Diaz? asked Louie.  Of course!  Joe said rather tersely, then introduced himself, and I told him where I was from.  I heard Louie yell from the kitchen, Watch out for that guy, Joe! He's a typical tourist  He's from Texas!


 

     Joe removed the painting from the chair, laid it aside on the floor, and invited me to come to the table and sit with him while Louie continued preparing food.  He asked how long I would be in Acapulco and I replied that I would be here about a week.  He laughed.  You can't really capture the uniqueness of Acapulco and of Mexico in a week, he said.  The  photographs you take back home with you, leave out two essentials.  Smell and sound.  How old are you?  Thirty-nine, I said.  He then looked past me and said, How old were we when we got here, Louie?  Louie replied, Old enough!  Jeezus Christ, why do you always have to ask that when there are strangers around?  Then Joe said with a rather large smile on his face, He's a little testy about us being as old as we are because he's a year older than I am.  He paused.  How would you like to take a tour of the art gallery Louie and I own after you finish your meal?  It's just down the street.


     After I finished my burger and fries and malted milk served by a rather growly-looking Louie, Joe and I went out the door and began to walk up the street to the gallery as he balanced the Rogelio Diaz painting gingerly in both of his hands.  I asked, You don't miss America?  He replied, Not  even a little bit. The people here are wonderful and the countryside is amazing.   Once we entered the gallery and he had hung the Diaz painting in the middle of the far wall, I looked around at brilliantly colored paintings combined with power and craftsmanship in a style that Joe called 'Mexican Expressionist.'  Diaz is one of the better artists we have here in Mexico, he said.  He then produced two glasses of iced-tea, smoked a cigarette, and talked awhile about his love of Mexico.  He asked me questions.  I told him that I was a former Lutheran minister, recently divorced, and that I was with a singles group from Houston called The Leisure Tree.  He excused himself for a moment and said that he needed to make a quick telephone and when he returned he asked me what I was doing for the rest of the afternoon and evening.  I replied that I had no solid plans and he invited me to go on a 10 kilometer drive west of the city to a place called Pie de La Cuesta and the Coyuga Lagoon. He then said, It's a part of the real Mexico.  I think that you ought to see it.


     We drove there in his bright-red  1955 Cadillac Coupe De ville, stopped for gas at the Zombia Gas Station, made our way along Colonia El Jarin and into a small village with rough waves on the sea on one side and the very calm lagoon on the other.  Early in the evening we sat at a window table in a small restaurant sipping tequila.  He asked me if I would like to take a walk.   We hiked along the cliff above the lagoon, saw young men and women flirting, all eyes and glances and whispers; watched groups of men, fathers with children, old women with lovely faces and kids pedaling tricycles; there were country people in sandals and straw hats and the sound of the roaring sea.  This is a place where you can stroll on the beach at four in the morning and feel safe he said.


     The sky was all purple and tinged with orange from the dying sun and we were now on our way to a place that had been a fishing village for centuries, one with a few thatched huts and palm trees dozing along the far shore of the Coyuga Lagoon.  There were mules toting bags filled with freshly caught fish and men and women who apparently preferred to live that way.  They lived out their lives in its quiet cobble stoned streets to the familiar rhythms of day and night, rainy summers and balmy winters.  Even the great upheaval of the Mexican revolution had little effect on the fishermen and small farmers who lived in this area, Joe said.  It was then that I took note of the men passing by us on the streets.  They would remove their sombreros and smile at Joe  and say, Buenas noches, Senor Joe and Joe would then smile and reply Buenas noches.  I asked, Do they know you?  He replied, My brother and I went into hiding here after we came ashore in Acapulco.  We were unaware of what the legal consequences might be for jumping ship.  We went in their dugout canoes and fished with them.  We lived in the village for over a year.


     It was almost midnight when we returned to his Coupe De ville for our trip back to Acapulco and he asked me if I could dump my friends at the Leisure Tree and take a three hour drive with him in the morning.  I immediately said yes and then asked, What about your art gallery, don't you have to be there?  He replied, I have a fine lady from Iowa who runs it for me whenever I choose not to be there.


     Shortly before ten o'clock on the following morning I found myself in the spectacular mountains surrounding the small village of Tetela.  It was a spectacular sight: sheer cliffs, sudden crags,  rocky formations, and behind them, other mountains rose, big and broad-shouldered - all a part of the Sierra Madre, the primordial spine of Mexico.The village of Tetela was populated with no more than about fourteen-hundred people at the most.  We walked under the warming sun, to the center of town.  Off to the right were cane fields and men riding horses, and on both sides of the valley were the mountains of Morales.  At the top of deeply terraced hills, sitting in doorways, their eyes cloudy with the past, were a cadre of old men who sat in silence watching us.  They fought with Zapata, Joe said. To this day, he remains their hero.  This is where the past and present of of Mexico co join.  One of reverence and  melancholy and grandeur.  A place that I thought you ought to see. 


      He then took me to the town's graveyard, where tiny cones of dust blew in the wind among the headstones.  The men here died for the country they loved, Joe said.  I did not know it at the time, but I would one day travel to the village of Tepoztlan 58 kilometers north of Tetela, to the place where Zapata and these men once fought.  I had been coming to Mexico for several years, but the sight of the gravestones moved me in complicated ways, so I remained silent and looked down at them.  It was then that Joe said, Louie used to come here with me.  He doesn't anymore.  Why's that? I asked.  He gave a small smile, As crusty as Louie appears to be, it always made him cry...


     He paused for a moment and then said, I think Louie would like it if you popped-in on him before you leave Acapulco.  On my final day in Acapulco I did just that.  It was early in the morning and The Lonely Gringo was empty of customers.  Louie smiled and greeted me as I entered the door, invited me to sit down at one of the tables, and brought two cups of coffee to the table.  Did Joe talk your ear-off? he asked.  Not really, I replied.  Me and Joe, we like to take folks under our wing from time-to-time.  I guess you could call us 'two old farts who love their adopted country' and want to share it with other folks.


     He then told me stories filled with elements of melodrama and redemption.  About a women they had met from Iowa, broken by a difficult marriage, who  came to Mexico with a vague hope for escape.  He and his brother had given her a job in the art gallery to erase the memory of her past and give her the future that they thought she deserved.  Another man had lost a much loved son to drugs; another had lost a career to whiskey; a third had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter.  All had come to Mexico to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.  All three of them were now employed by he and his brother.  Two as cooks, the third was now an artist with paintings hung in their gallery. 


     When those things happen, Louie said, you have to help them.  You have to help them see the country that made you whole.  He then smiled.  Did you know that my brother phoned me when you two were in the gallery and told me you once  were a preacher.  He laughed .  We both thought that you'd be the right kind of guy.  I asked, The right kind of guy for what?  He smiled, Being our Minister of Propaganda the next time you return to Mexico.


     Forty-years after that, when I had moved through vast, empty stretches of parched and unfamiliar Mexican land, alone in the emptiness of Mexico, going up  a rutted dirt road to see something new and wonderful, I thought of two old men who had once jumped ship into an unfamiliar land and grew to love another country more than they  had their own some sixty-seven years before...


     ...And thanked God for that unexpected moment when I had accidentally met-up with two old men who called themselves Louie and Joe forty-years ago - as I stepped inside of an Acapulco hamburger joint called The Lonely Gringo...

a quick response to recent events:


IN RECENT DAYS, THE PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL HAS NOW SPOKEN TO CONGRESS...

AND FORTY-SEVEN SENATORS HAVE SENT A LETTER TO IRAN, WHICH HAPPENED to be spearheaded by a newly elected Senator from Arkansas by the name of Tom Cotton, who had just received $l million dollars from William Krystol's Emergency Fund for Israel and prompted a quick reply from the Supreme Leader of Iran informing Senator Cotton that he needed a refresher course in the Proper Procedures of .American Congressional Law, particularly went came to the unwanted and unasked for tinkering around in foreign affairs.  All of which happened to be done behind the President's back in the name of democracy, but were nothing more than an attempt an attempt to sabotage democratic freedom in foreign affairs, solely designed with the intent of making the President of the United States look foolish because he happened to black. In the wider game of political society, the principles of conflict ran rampant, the goal of harmony became a thing of the past.  The goal was dominance: to take no prisoners, and, in Murray Kempton's phrase, shoot the wounded became the norm.  The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation, disintegration - but the truth is nothing more that stagnant racism perpetrated at the onset of the President's ascent to office by a Kentucky Senator by the name of Mitch McConnell and aided by a Congressman from Ohio by the name of John Boehner. 


     All of this was backed-up, of course, by the ever-present and always grumpy Senator from Arizona, John McCain, whose ferocious logic of the adjective insists that the only solution for world affairs is not negotiation but the declaration of war.  In the America of these three men, it seems always to be the shedding of flesh and blood, Us against Them.  Our side must be in conflict with Their side.  It's not enough to be an American; you must despise, diminish, and empty the guts of those others Americans who are not like y0u.  Every smashed bone and dashed hope of others do not matter.  The result is that we have become a society in apparently permanent, teeming, nerve-fraying conflict: blacks against whites, straights against gays, gays against priests, priests against abortionists; sun people against ice people; Latinos against Anglos; folks who work against those who don't; cops against innocent black kids; political hacks against the rights of women; and the Supreme Court aiding-and-abetting Voter Suppression.


     But there are also additional confusions.  The most rigid advocates of this form of hyphen aren't really talking about the multiple, the plural, or about the natural human movement toward synthesis and reconciliation.   They do not want to add to the fund of individual knowledge or international negotiation.  Thy are insisting upon indoctrinating the replacement of the many with the singular.  There is only one road to salvation - and they know what it is.  Simply put: it is segregation of the mind.  It is also a fraud.  They prefer violence to talk.  War to peace.  Lies to the truth.  The point of all this sound and fury is fragmentation.  Conflict is all. The apocalyptic demand is for alteration of the past and allow them to guide us into the unknown future.  One now seething in bitterness over a President of a different color other than their own.


     One-upon-a-time we created the twentieth-century American political style.  The most effective politicians - Sam Rayburn ,Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Taft - employed basic courtesy in dealing with their opponents.  They disagreed on many things.  They were capable of immense vanity.  They knew in the end, politics was about power.  But they did not think it necessary to destroy the enemy.  The enemy was over there: Hitler, Tojo, Stalin.  Those who swung the broadswords at other Americans - the Joe Mcarthys, the Bilos and Eastlands - accomplished nothing.  They were cheap, vulgar men - ignorant, parochial, and cynical.  They never rose to higher office because the American people would not have them.  The tougher men and women who truly changed the world, who moved it along, made it better, did so with a clarity of vision and a certain amount of grace. They were always willing to settle for half a loaf.  And they each in their own way did think about what was best for the country.  They were, after all, Americans before they were Ohioans or  Kentuckians or Democrats or Republicans.  They respected the contract.  They respected the presidency...


     ...And they have now been replaced by professional cynics filled with bitterness.   The reason?  There happens to be a black man in the White House...

 bad day at Eagle Peak:


THE TENTS WERE DARK GREEN AND WET WITH RAIN...

AND THEY WERE PITCHED IN A GROVE OF PINES NEXT to a road not far from a lake.  Young boys and girls  ran from tent to tent in the rain.  Near a chicken-wire fence surrounding the enclave a member of the Colorado State Highway Patrol stood at the gate with a colt revolver tucked under his poncho into a soft pistol case holstered on his hip.  I know this seems a little odd to you, Pastor, having guys like us hanging-around a youth camp, but it's the only option we have at this point, said another member of the Highway Patrol.  His name was Murray and he was in his late 30s, with graying black hair, he nodded at the man next to the chicken-wire fence and took me into his tent.   We were in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range 4 miles from the town of Eagle Peak, Colorado which lay about 10 miles north-west of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs at a Lutheran Youth Camp.  


   Anguished looking parents were everywhere.  All of them gathered outside the tent, men dressed in suits and women in fashionable dresses standing beneath umbrellas, along with several police detectives with wrinkled suit jackets that did not match their trousers.  The camp staff immediately made calls to all of the parents, I said.  We evacuated as many children as we could after we received the call from your office in Commerce city, shut down the cabins, and set up the tents on the hill above the camp shortly before you arrived.  More parents are on their way now.  


     Murray replied,  They can enter the grounds only if they're allowed through, Pastor.  The road's been blocked by State Police and we can't evacuate the remainder of the children or their parents until we have some idea where this guy actually is.   He then looked directly at me.   Are you the only Pastor left?  I am, I said, my fellow Pastors took as many campers as They could in our bus and several cars into Colorado Springs.  When did he escape?  Last night, Murray replied.  He apparently made his way out of the prison hidden in a laundry truck and they didn't know he was missing until a head-count was taken prior to the evening meal as the prisoners entered the mess hall.  He had hit a guard over the head with an iron, took his pistol, jumped out of the truck, and went through a lethal fence that should have killed him. He then rose from the tan foam camp chair he had been sitting in and motioned for me to do the same.   He's armed-and-dangerous.  In other words, he's a very sick guy and since the prison in Canon City is only 30 miles away for all we know he could be up in the hills right now looking down at us, he added as we both exited the tent. 


     He was obviously proud of being a Major in the Highway Patrol and as such a District-Branch Commander.  When we came into view of the others, he moved easily through the milling crowds of parents and frightened children.  I asked him, How do you know he would come here?  And Murray replied, He's a convicted child predator and this camp was one of his old  hunting grounds.  There are three others.  We've got them staked out too.  My hunch is that he's here.  He grew-up on a farm near Eagle Peak.  His eyes moved easily through the crowd and consistently looked up at the mountains above, then added, After he had raped them he strangled one of the girls to death.  The rain had now turned into a fine drizzle.  One of the teenage boys came over with two small cups of plastic coffee.  He asked the boy how he was doing and where he was from.  The boy replied that he was from Pueblo and that he was frightened.  That was the growing reality for all of us.


     As nightfall began in earnest, searchlights had been set-up by the Highway Patrol and were now roving over the campground  like in a prison movie I had once seen called Stalag 17.  Other Patrol Officers were preparing meals for the parents and children on several rusted-out camp stoves.  As the rain grew heavier, I  spotted a woman who sat at the corner of one of the tents alone in the with a young child cradled between her knees.  She just sat there silently blinking up at the rain.  She is a mother of the girl he raped and killed.  Murray said.  She somehow got wind of his escape and immediately drove here because she figured that this was probably headed.  She wants to see him dead.  We argued.  She won.  So I let her stay only if she promised to keep out of my way.  Which is against protocol and my superiors will probably chew my ass for doing that.  He shook his head.  But I can't even  begin to imagine how she feels.


     Another woman, fat and bulky, came up to Murray and whispered quietly in his ear.  He listened gravely, nodding his head, his arms across his chest.  He then spoke to her for awhile and she went away.  She wanted to leave right now, he said.  I told her that she would have to wait awhile, until it was safer.  She then asked what would happen if shooting began.  What did you tell her? I asked.  I said we would try to protect everyone, he replied.  But if we somehow missed seeing her that she should just duck down for cover and pray like the Devil.


     The woman with the child cradled in her arms was still sitting there alone, beyond communication, when we walked past her and down into the camp.  Over to the left was a small outside toilet, long abandoned.  A mound of orange peels, empty soda cans, and flattened milk cartons lay soaking in the rain along the pathway in front of us.  As we made our way up some steps and opened the door into the camp mess hall, rain pelted the windows and the wind made a ghostly sound.  We will put a first aid station in here just in case we need it, Murray said.  We left the mess hall cabin  and began to make our way back up the hill.  There were a couple of Highway Patrolmen sitting aimlessly on a large wet rock.  We started up the hill, and suddenly the fat and bulky woman ran toward us through the mud waving her hands. 


     He's here!!! she screamed. Oh my God, he's here!!!


     About 50 yards ahead, we saw a man in a horizontally striped prison uniform running through the pine trees and diving into a ditch alongside the chicken-wire fence, and heard the snapping of small arms fire coming from the pistol of the Colorado Highway State Patrolman who had been standing by the gate.  It was then that the fat and bulky woman slipped and fell and plopped face down in the mud, attempting to get back up onto her feet as the two of us ran past.   Other Patrolmen were firing now, a mixture of rifles and pistols, but there was no return of fire from the ditch.  Then, as quickly as it had begun, the firing mysteriously stopped.


     Murray and I looked down into the ditch.  The man lay face-up dead in a gully filled with mud and blood with rain spattering against his open and unblinking eyes.  I looked around, the woman with the child cradled in her arms had now come up and was standing by our side.  She looked down, spat on the dead man's face, said thank you to Murray, then quietly walked away through the rain and into the darkness of the night.


      In the pre-dawn awakening of the sun, an ambulance came up the mud filled road and took away the corpse, parents and children began to vacate the campsite, the rain came to an end as the wind pounded hard against the swaying branches of the pine trees, drowning out the din of the camp where the Highway Patrolmen and detectives were packing up up their rifles and putting them neatly into the trunks of their cars as they were barking orders at one another.


     Murray walked me back to the gate near the chicken-wire fence and into the small parking lot beyond, shook my hand and wished me a safe journey.  The road was heavy with traffic,  there were two Highway Patrol cars in front of me, and a truck covered with a wet green tarpaulin.  A Jeep with and Idaho license plate came from the other direction and paused to look at the camp .  The man on the driver's side of the Jeep rolled down his window and asked, What's going on?  I looked in the opposite direction and did not reply because I didn't know what to say...


     ...Or how to properly explain to him that I  had just seen a man laying dead in a ditch filled with mud and blood looking up at me with unblinking eyes...


      ...And praying to God that I would never see anything like that again...