Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Snippets

Charlie Kirk said, “George Floyd was a scumbag. Does that mean he deserved to die? No, of course not.” Replace “George Floyd” with “Charlie Kirk.” What would the outcry be?

Pete Hegseth wants “warriors” in this man’s army. Apparently, according to Hegseth, warriors don’t have beards. I watch Sunday football, and many of the players have quite luxurious facial growths. Apparently, at least according to Hegseth, I was wrong if I thought of them as manly men. They have beards. They are wusses. A tradition in the NHL is for players not to shave as long as they are in the playoffs. Once again, they are pansies, not warriors. Hegseth wants lethality in our armed forces. Nothing produced more deaths in our history than the Civil War. After hearing Hegseth, I don’t know how the North won with the bearded Ulysses S. Grant in charge. I thought he was a warrior, but apparently just another wuss. Maybe his side won because the Confederates had bearded Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Those two must have been really big pansies if they lost to Grant. Certainly, the fairy Custer, with his hair, could not be in Hegseth’s army. And in World War II, Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, who were on the front lines for the entire war, were never clean shaven. If they were still around, they might like to know that they are not wanted in Hegseth’s army. So they can just go home.

In the wake of Kirk’s death, I ask, not for the first time, What is a Christian?

Perhaps if General Grant and General Eisenhower had spent less time on military strategy, tactics, and logistics and more on pullups, pushups, and sit-ups, the Civil War and World War II would have ended sooner. I wondered, too, if the generals who were flown from all four corners of the world to Virginia (at enormous expense, one might add) might have had better things to do than to sit in a lecture on sartorial issues and calisthenics.

At my new residence I am about to start a six-week course on the musical theater. The first week, we will study the seminal Oklahoma! When I watched a video of it, I realized that I knew most of the music, but I have no idea how. I have never seen a live production of the musical and only clips of the movie. When I was a boy, our family did not have a record player much less a hi-fi. We did have a radio, but I don’t believe I ever heard show tunes out of it. Still, I know much of the score. How do we learn the stuff we do?

Pete Hegseth seems not to want women in the armed forces. He certainly does not want transgender men. I wonder what his reaction would be to what Tony Horwitz relates in his Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998). As a result of an automobile accident in 1911, a union Civil War hero was discovered to be a woman. She was then sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear skirts, in which she was clumsy. She died as the result of a hip injury after a fall. Horwitz reports that at least 400 women disguised as men fought in the Civil War.

When I was eight or nine, the news was filled with UFO sightings. I wanted to spot one and spent much time in the backyard gazing upward. I was getting discouraged when one day as I looked over the Schneidermann house I saw what appeared to be a rotating, silvery disk. It came closer and hovered almost silently about fifty feet off the ground at the back of our property. A hatch slid open, and a creature came down on a beam of light. It got to the grass just outside the kohlrabi patch, but I could not discern any features. It was fully covered in hair. I could not tell if there was a head, or arms, or feet because of all the hair. But there was what appeared to be a hypodermic needle coming out of where the head might have been. Father must have seen the lights because he was standing just behind me. With my voice that had not broken, I asked, “What is that?” “My last-born son,” he intoned, “that is definitely a furry with the syringe on the top.”

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Presidential Rock

No president has performed heavy metal or even any good rock. Or rap. We have had some insipid piano playing, some mediocre saxophone, and a good version of Amazing Grace. But no real rock ‘n’ roll. Or rap. And I believe the country would be better if the president rocked. Or rapped. However, after extensive, made-up research, I have found that many presidents did make music. Some examples:

Of course, the hits began with George Washington and his surprising novelty, Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor in the Dentures Overnight?

This was followed by Thomas Jefferson’s unclassifiable, but revealing, song that was huge in the South, Love in Chains. The third president had a follow-up success in the North, Set My Love Free?  

It was Dolley Madison who had a hit that referred to her husband’s constitutional amendment career with a refrain still resonating today: “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy Mad, Are those rights just a fad?”

Andrew Jackson sang now forgotten plaintive Appalachian songs accompanying himself on the acoustic dulcimer.

Then there was Millard Fillmore.  No one knew who he was, so no one knew if he sang anything.

Abraham Lincoln accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln on the concertina as she sang, Re-United. Lincoln himself on the late-night tavern circuit tried to set With Malice Toward None to music, but, of course, he never finished it.

Rutherford B. Hayes performed with disastrous consequences still felt today, Reconstruction is for Suckas.

The insomniac William McKinley sang with some success his Mr. Tariffing Man. It was only after the full effects of Smoot-Hawley were seen in the Depression that the lyrics were expanded to include: “that evenings empire has returned into sand/Vanished from my hand/Left me blindly here to stand. . . .”

William Taft, who could not lie, was too obvious when he sang,”I like big butts.” The country back then, however, apparently did not.

Woodrow Wilson seemed convincing when in 1916 he sang “War! What is it good for?” And then he led us into war.

Warren Harding sang old family “darky” songs that would be considered offensive by many today but would be banned by others as DEI.

Calvin Coolidge did not sing but he was a trained mime. He did not get enough recognition for his Man Walking Backwards Against Heavy Wind although he was overpraised for miming handcuffing the Boston Police strikers.

Not surprisingly, FDR could not rock. His only memorable song was The Wheels on the Chair Go ‘Round and ‘Round.

Eisenhower avoided music. He thought that the public would demand from him martial tunes, which he hated.

Kennedy largely spared us those Irish jigs where four or eight bars are endlessly repeated until the fiddler gets tired and stops.

Not many people know that W wrote many lyrics, but they were so filled with malapropisms that no one could understand them.

And now under Trump we have endlessly repeated I Am Just a Fool (in Love) ((with Myself.))

Posted on by rjonakait

Ten Cartoons a Day

Ten cartoons a day. I was flabbergasted when I read that. I considered myself a bright person, but one with little creativity. Right after reading about ten cartoons a day, I paused and tried to dream up a cartoon. Nothing at all. I tried again two hours later. Zilch. In the afternoon I created nada. In the evening niente.

I could not come up with one idea for any sort of cartoon in a day, but Bill Mauldin said that while learning his craft, he forced himself to create at least ten new cartoons every day. That remarkable regime stuck in the recesses of my mind long after I had read about it in his bestselling book, The Brass Ring. However, it popped to the surface again when I recently saw a two-hour documentary about Bill Mauldin, If It’s Big, Hit It. The directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce were in attendance and said that their film had not yet found a distributor. They had bad timing, having finished the movie at the beginning of Covid. They explained further that few people today knew of Mauldin, and memories of World War II had faded.

Mauldin had gained fame for his World War II cartoons, meticulously drawn, featuring Willie and Joe, the unshaven, cigarette-dangling, front-line infantry dogfaces. First published in military newspapers, the cartoons were later syndicated in the United States. I knew from my reading that Mauldin was with the Army as it slogged north through Italy and was frequently at the front lines. And I knew that after the war, he was an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and later for the Chicago Sun-Times. I had seen many of his cartoons before but saw them regularly in the Sun-Times when I lived in Chicago in the 1960s.

However, I learned much more from the documentary. I learned about a hardscrabble childhood in America’s southwest. He moved out of the house when barely a teenager; his cartooning began with a high school newspaper even though he did not graduate from that school. (He was given an honorary diploma many years later.) He enlisted in the National Guard before the attack on Pearl Harbor, at least in part because it was the only job he could find. The syndication of his WWII cartons made him a wealthy young man and a darling of the media. He had multiple marriages and had children from each of those unions. He drank too much and died of Alzheimer’s disease.

I did not know that the title of the film — “If it’s big, hit it” — was his own quote. It fit; His cartoons often lampooned and skewered the powerful. His World War II cartoons often satirized the brass, getting Mauldin in trouble with George S. Patton. (Mauldin’s work continued to run in the military papers because Patton’s boss, Dwight D. Eisenhower, maintained they were good for morale.) His satirization of the Bigs continued in civilian life; one of his post-war cartoons caused the FBI to open a file on Mauldin, under the frequently applied theory that if someone criticized the United States, he was communist inspired. He not only advocated hitting the big, he also, quite literally, got hit in return. When the police, instead of giving tickets, protected illegally double-parked cars of friends of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Mauldin took pictures of the license plates. The cartoonist was rewarded with a fist to the nose, and photographs of his blood-smeared face ran in the papers.

The movie showed many of Mauldin’s cartoons. Some were classics that had burrowed into my memory, but others were new to me. Many of these were frightening; cartoons about racism, homophobia, suppression of rights, and other topics published a half-century ago could run unaltered today and be equally relevant and insightful. The United States has changed, but not as much as it should have.

I was impressed with Bill Mauldin before watching the movie, and even more so after the screening. Mauldin was unique, but he also fits into that category of creative people who amaze and mystify me. First there is the drive. Writers write; painters paint; and as Mauldin showed, cartoonists cartoon. They may desire and even achieve wealth and fame, but that is the byproduct of their creative urge. Ten cartoons a day. That came from a drive to be a cartoonist, not from a drive to be rich.

I understand that such creative drive exists, but as a non-creative person, I wish I better understood the source of creativity itself. How did Brian Wilson create “Pet Sounds” or Gabriel Garcia Marquez create One Hundred Years of Solitude? I know that creative people almost always work hard at honing their craft (ten cartoons a day), just as Usain Bolt spent much effort at perfecting his craft of running fast. While I feel as though I can grasp the concept of the ability to run fast, I can’t fathom artistic talent. For stretches of his career, Bill Mauldin published editorial cartoons six days a week. How is that possible? Maybe you could figure it out for me if you could see If It’s Big, Hit It. It is well worth seeing, but since it does not have a distributor, you won’t be able to. However, with a little effort on the internet or a little more looking for used books, you can still find Mauldin’s cartoons. Do it not to keep his memory fresh, but because it will help keep your mind and sense of humor and outrage more alive.