James M. Redwine

Mark Twain

Motherhood and Apple Pie

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I am for both of these institutions and I bet so are most voters. So the slight of hand our politician’s must pull off is to make us think we are getting Mom’s apple pie for our tax monies when, in fact, we may be getting Jezebel’s cow pie.  

Take the Patriot Act for instance. The full name the naming gnomes came up with for this abomination is: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001.” An example of the Act’s true purpose is the secret FISA courts it created. FISA courts are Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts where the term “court” is turned on its head. Secret proceedings are the stuff of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, not places where due process and the protection of rights and liberty occur. Nothing could be less patriotic than The Patriot Act.

Much as we have ignored and subverted our core principles of innocent until and unless proven guilty in Guantanamo Bay “Detention” Camp, our legal and political system has incrementally used words to obfuscate and mislead. A detention center is where bad behaving children are disciplined. Guantanamo is America’s shameful gulag where we give the lie to our core values every day it remains open.

George Orwell was an English writer but his prescient works, Animal Farm and 1984, could be sounding the alarm for our government’s attempts to have us believe politicians pet projects are infrastructure and military incursions are peace missions. It is difficult to get voters to re-elect a politician if they know the person they are paying about $200,000 per year is spending trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds on pet projects and claiming they are infrastructure. Maybe what the politician wants to fund is a good idea but lying to the American public to get it funded is not.

Perhaps if we would rename broccoli, ice cream, we could save broccoli farmers from bankruptcy. Or maybe we could champion those wonderful brussel sprouts as COVID-19 cures. I am confident there would be some late-night charlatan somewhere on the internet or cable t.v. who would run such an idea as a Biblical alternative to vaccines.

As Congress castigates Mark Zuckerberg and wrings its hands at his subliminal manipulation of our youth, perhaps it could turn its spotlight on itself and start policing its own Newspeak. The politicians’ callous indifference to the citizenry’s confusion over science and religion or peace and war or progress over stagnation is in need of a good analysis by a contemporary Will Rogers or Mark Twain or George Orwell or Joseph (Catch 22) Heller.

Anyway, I cannot devote any more time to such pursuits as it is the middle of football season. So, for now, I must concentrate upon what is truly important, at least to me, and I will blithely rely upon the goodwill of the politicians to address the rest in terms that lull me back to indifference.

Thanks A Lot Noah

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In his book Letters From The Earth, Mark Twain has Noah making an extra trip in the Ark so he could save the housefly that spreads typhoid fever. I could not find any reference to scorpions in the Book of Genesis nor in the account of the Great Flood that also appears in the Quran. However, Noah, or in Arabic, Nuh, must have heroically preserved the “creature with the burning sting” as I stepped on one in our cabin at JPeg Osage Ranch last night. If Satan had stepped on a scorpion with bare cloven hoof, I bet he would have sent a scathing letter to heaven from his temporary banishment on Earth. Perhaps then either St. Michael or St. Gabriel, the Devil’s correspondents, might have pointed out to the Creator that His creation of the scorpion was a bust.

The Latin name, scorpion, given to the eight-legged arachnid with the pinching front claws and the stinging tail aptly describes the menace that apparently has no value except to encourage one to wear shoes in the house. Except for me, scorpions have few natural enemies other than lizards and tarantulas; choose your poison.

What I want to know is whom did Mother Nature put in charge of species extinction and why hasn’t She extinguished scorpions? Scorpions have been around for 435 million years and, I humbly suggest, that is long enough. According to Google (who else are you going to rely on), extinctions are a normal part of evolution. They occur naturally, periodically and somewhat regularly. We Homo sapiens would not be here if millions of other species, dinosaurs for example, had not gone extinct before we came out of the primordial ooze two to three hundred thousand years ago after two to three million years of genetic iterations of hominids.

I submit it is fair to ask Mother Nature, “What were you thinking?” Much like the White-Tailed Hornet of poet laureate Robert Frost’s poem, it appears to me whoever designed the scorpion should have gone back to the drawing board, or better yet, file thirteened the whole thing. The white-tailed hornet (or scorpion) might be viewed romantically by nature lovers who assume infallibility or even lovability in all of nature’s creations. But Frost (1874-1963) watched in disillusionment as a white-tailed hornet in search of a fly to eat repeatedly attacked both the head of a nail and Frost’s nose. As Frost concludes about nature and life in general, once we begin to see the fallibility of the natural world “reflected in the mud and even dust” we can no longer convince ourselves we humans are only a little lower than the angels and are probably no higher than creepy crawlers on the floor.

 

The White-Tailed Hornet

The white-tailed hornet lives in a balloon (nest)
That floats against the ceiling of the woodshed
…
Verse could be written on the certainty
With which he penetrates my best defense
Of whirling hands and arms about the head
To stab me in the sneeze-nerve of a nostril
…
I watched him where he swooped, he pounced, he struck;
But what he found was just a nail head (not a fly).
…
Won’t this whole instinct matter bear revision?
To err is human, not to, animal.
Or so we pay the compliment to instinct.
…
’Twas disillusion upon disillusion.

 

In much the same manner as Frost’s hornet, did that scorpion on my cabin floor mistake me for either dinner or a possible mate? Why bother me at all? When it should have been gainfully employed in more reasonable pursuits it was not using any reason and we both suffered for its frailty.

The Greek astronomer Ptolemy identified the constellation Scorpius in the 2nd century A.D. Why didn’t Mother Nature take that as a clue to make scorpions extinct 2,000 years ago? Even Nancy Reagan with her reliance on astrology for advice to her husband on affairs of state might have used her influence to have “Scorpio” disappeared from our existence by bringing the power of the federal government to bear. After all, our federal government killed off generations of eagles and other more cuddly species than scorpions with DDT. Why did scorpions escape?

I am glad the bison somehow miraculously survived mankind’s slaughter but do wonder what if any reason exists to preserve the scorpion. I guess it comes down to “Only the good die young” and we humans have been around about 430 million fewer years than the scorpion. We will probably be gone long before scorpions pass.

On the other hand, perhaps I can convince Jeff Bezos and Amazon to help me market scorpions to the public as pets. Hey, entrepreneur Gary Dahl got rich back in the 1970’s by convincing people a rock could be a loving pet. Maybe a slogan such as “Get Your Zing Avoiding a Sting” could be catchy. Or maybe I could sell them as a great gift idea for misanthropic people or dry them out and make necklaces from them. I see all kinds of people sporting plastic human skulls on their belt buckles or as tattoos.

Of course, if I were able to get such an enterprise going the government would just regulate it out of existence or tax it to death. Well, at least I could get rid of some of the crunchy little crustaceans that way. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just need to wear my shoes and watch my step.

 

Hope Springs Eternal

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According to Google Search (sounds like gospel to me), the Fountain of Youth is located in Osage County, Oklahoma at latitude 36.6461942° north, longitude -96.097216° west, at an elevation 938 feet above sea level. To be more precise, Ponce de Leon Spring is at that location on the grounds of the Woolaroc Museum & Wildlife Preserve. Therefore, Gentle Reader, you can actually visit Osage County’s version of what people have vigilantly searched for since at least the days of Greek historian Herodotus (484 BC – 425 BC), that is, the hope for eternal youth.

Woolaroc is a marvelous creation by oil man Frank Phillips whose namesake Route 66 is America’s “Mother Road”. Phillips’ gift to the rest of us is an amazing eclectic collection of animals, art and artifacts. It is also only seven miles from our home, JPeg Osage Ranch, so we get to enjoy it every time we drive along Oklahoma State Highway 123 between Bartlesville and Barnsdall, Oklahoma. You can do the same thing almost every day; but during the summer the museum is closed on Mondays and then in the winter it is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.  Woolaroc (woods, lakes and rocks) is one of Osage County’s greatest treasures. It is inexpensive, easy to access and a rare concentration of great western art, such as original paintings by Charles Russell and Frederic Remington and original bronzes by Osage County’s own Jim Hamilton and John Free. However, for now let’s you and I return to the Fountain of Youth.

Ponce de Leon (1474 – 1521) was born in Spain and spent his adult life pillaging the Caribbean for gold while using the indigenous Taino Indians for forced labor. There was some small measure of justice administered when in 1521 Ponce de Leon was shot in the thigh with an Indian arrow in Florida and languished in pain until his eventual death in Cuba. Ponce de Leon claimed to be searching for what most people think was a mythical fountain of youth reportedly because he was nearly 50 years old when he married a teenage girl. In reality, it was not youth he was seeking but the location and plunder of Indian gold. I cannot advise on the efficacy of the Ponce de Leon Spring waters as Peg and I have as yet not come across the proper procedure for gaining permission to access the spring. We hope to hear from the museum’s curator or maybe order some bottles online. Surely someone at Amazon is looking for a way to market such a valuable commodity. My guess is there may be a fairly substantial fee involved for what Mark Twain suggested would be the proper way aging should occur, that is, starting at 80 years of age (we are getting there) and working backwards to 18 (there’s no harm in dreaming as even Merlin youthened instead of aging).

Apparently, the Spanish conquistadors were more interested in gold than youth as such marauders as Leon and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (1541) spent what was left of their youth searching for Cibola, the fabled seven cities of gold, that were rumored to exist in southwestern America.

Unlike the French explorers, such as René La Salle (1682), Jean Baptiste de La Harpe (1718) and Claude Charles du Tiene (1719) who sought trade with the native Americans in what became Oklahoma, the Spanish had less concern with Indian sensibilities. Fortunately, Spain sold its claims to raid the area to France’s Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800. Then in 1803 Napoleon sold the entire Louisiana Purchase to the newly established United States of America for fifteen million dollars. This purchase included what is now named Ponce de Leon Spring almost next to our home. So, if you will excuse me, I am going to see about getting permission for a quick soak to wash away a few years.

The Coliseum Revisited

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Peg & Jim Redwine at the Coliseum

 

If CNN, MSNBC and FOX News were covering the entertainments in the Roman Coliseum in the First Century they would have been exhorting the lions. Of course, the reason for this is the ratings would suffer if they sided with the humans. The public demands spectacle, not fairness.

Or as Mark Twain opined: “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives”. Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter VII.

In William Shakespeare’s Othello, Act 3, scene 3, Iago complains: “Who steals my purse steals trash …[But] who filches from me my good name robs me of that which (does not) enrich him [but] makes me poor indeed”.

Our current spectacle steals from both accused and accuser equally. When it comes time to clear the floor of the Congressional Coliseum no one will remain unscathed and we will all be poorer. Rome today is a decaying tourist amusement. The days of roads, aqueducts, legal systems and Pax Romana declined with the declining investment of the citizenry in self-government. Today we would have to include the national media in this equation.

It is not that we do not know how to reasonably go about choosing our leaders such as presidents, legislators and supreme court justices, it is that it is a lot more fun to watch others being ripped apart than to engage in rational debate. Bring on the lions, we are bored with this democracy thing!

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