Just following orders

 The end of the previous post reminded me of something recently that bugged me when I ran across it.

If you've read this blog for a while you've probably run into some maunderings about Star Wars in general (from my kid's former addiction) and the "clone trooper" characters in particular (because, well, soldiers and soldiering. And my affection for the Karen Traviss Republic Commando series).

Way back in 2011 I wrote about one of the "Clone War" arcs that I watched with the Kiddo. I was actually impressed with the potential for depth of the story...

"You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.

And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives."

...while being frustrated and disappointed by the resolution: 

"...basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master

- the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.

The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him."

Well, not too long ago I found out that Lucas had retconned his prequels yet again.

This time it was to insert - literally - an Elmo-style brain implant into his clone soldiers. This gimmick is supposed to have taken control of them when "Order 66" is issued and turns all the guys into ruthless killers. 

In one of the story arcs at one point some of our heros manage to yank this thing (whut? how? without killing the guy, I mean...) which makes the troopers Good Guys again.

That...bugs the living shit out of me, and I finally figured out why.

Because it steals the soldiers' humanity.

Way too many people as it is already think of soldiers as robots, trained like seals, meat puppets, unable to think or choose rationally, slaves to the rules and their orders.

Now, here, it's even more explicit; these men aren't "men". They're just like robots, with an electronic device that enslaves them, that forces them to act on another's will.

One of the most troubling, and troubled, questions a soldier - a person - will ever face is whether to do something that is morally fraught. Whether it's on their own or at the insistence of another, to do something that's perilously close to - or even over the line into - outright wrong.

This was one of those and while the television episode 12 years ago missed a great opportunity to tell a real story about that crisis this is, if anything, worse.

Think of the fictional setting.

Here are soldiers and their officers who have, many of them, gone through years and long, hard miles together, fought alongside each other, suffered together, grieved their dead and maimed friends together.

Suddenly events take place that suggest that those officers may be part of a deadly conspiracy.

And those officers are, most of them, powerful magic users while the soldiers are just men, muggles in the Potteresque sense, as helpless before their officers' magic as a child before an adult.

They can "arrest" their officers only if the officers let them. And the whole point is that the officers are supposed to have already begun to act in what has been a secret takeover using that magic. So the government, the legal authority, can't take chances - it orders the soldiers to execute their own officers.

That's a horrific situation, and it should have been. It should have forced the soldiers - and their officers - to confront the ties that bound them and the difference in the balance of power that separated them.

It should have given us some drama with a crushing moral weight, including agony and conflict between those soldiers who followed what they believed to be lawful orders with those who refused, believing that no such order could be lawful. And the aftermath; those men who killed other men who might have been leader they loved like brothers.

Instead it had all been retconned into not a moral dilemma...just a technical problem, a hardware glitch, that can be solved with a hammer and chisel and some pliers.

Yeah, yeah...it's schlock, just junk fiction. But who says that junk fiction has to be schlock? Some writers have done damn good work in this fictional world, and if ever there was an opportunity, this was one.

 Buy'ce olar, kar'ta ogir.

What a waste.

La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

The Way of the Cat (猫侍 )!

 My Bride bagged the "one-free-month" sub to Amazon Prime late in December. So far she's been disappointed that most of the movies that are worth watching aren't free, and the ones that are free are worth shit.

(I could have told her that before she did, if I didn't value my ass...)

I'm not nearly as arsed about the movie thing (at least, not nearly as pissed off as when fucking Comcast moved the old movie channel ("Turner Classic Movies") over to the pay side, the bastards.) and so I've tooled around the site looking for entertainment options, and in so doing stumbled across 猫侍 - the first season of Neko Zamurai, a 2013 series presumably aired on NHK.

It's just a goof, on both the classic Kurosawa-style samurai tropes as well as cats and cat people in general. It's silly, sometimes serious, often funny, and truly, deeply weird in ways that only genuinely Japanese pop culture is weird.

The macguffin is that our hero, an out-of-work samurai (or ronin) is trying to get hired on with a new daimyo in Edo-period Tokyo. This is working out about as well as you'd think (you might not recall but we discussed the problems the samurai-class ran into after the end of the warring states period back when we talked about Shiroyama in 2011) and he's about at the end of his katana when a flunky for the local mob boss comes to him with an offer.

Turns out the boss has recently become hooked up with a cat and has gone all gooney over the possum, neglecting his yakuza-y business. Flunky wants to pay Madarame - the ronin/samurai - to put a hit on the kitty.

Of course he can't, and the rest of the series is about his misadventures trying to hang on to his new furry friend whilst dodging the Hanzo-the-Razor detective parody, Shimazaki.

Of course there's a cat-crap-ton of other silly business, including Madarame's adorable neighbor Wakana the donut vendor...

...and his local vet and sorta-crazy-cat lady Oshizu who tries to make him smile while teaching him the Way of the Cat (for a guy who's faithful to his wife back in the country Madarame seems to run into all sorts of adorable cat-ladies...).

There's even an Edo-period cat cafe just because, well, cats.

So far it's been good fun (tho it's hard to see how the showrunners will get a happy ending out of it - the detectives are closing in on our hero and he's set himself up to take a dive in the big swordfight against his old comrade/rival, so we'll see...) both on it's own and as a send up of both classic chanbara (チャンバラ) flicks as well as modern Japan, cats, and cat-support-staff (of which I am self-admittedly one).

Very watchable, if you're in the mood for a light and clever trifle.

nyaa! にゃー!

(A note on にゃー!: The Japanese expression for the sound a cat makes is "nya", and the characters in the show use it a fair bit, so I've been hearing it regularly for a while now. 

It still seems very odd, since even as they say it, it doesn't sound like "meow". But just like "wan" is the noise a Japanese dog makes, "nya" is a Japanese cat, and that's just how it is. Funny thing, language.

But what is kind of odd is that the title of this show is written in hiragana as 猫侍. In romaji you'd write that Neko Zamurai and translate it precisely as "Cat Samurai", which makes total sense given that the show is about a samurai that is all about his kitty.

But for some reason the title is regularly given in English as "Samurai Cat";

which totally doesn't work, because it implies that the samurai IS the cat, and is also the title of an actual pop culture thing, the Nineties series of heavy-handed satirical light novels by someone named Mark E. Rogers. 

Nya!)

Talking about believing unbelievable things...

 ...here's the Little Cat being fooled by digital images of delicious prey:

I've seen videos of cats doing this, but I haven't before lived with a cat that was enticed by video images. Miss Lily loved to sit at the window and imagine massacring the feeder birds, but video didn't elicit the same response.

What was kind of fascinating is that The Girl played a whole series of these "cat video" clips, and the Little One's reaction to them was very different.

As you can see, the birds and rodents were boffo box office. She sat on the couch and followed the bird movements with her head as they flicked across the screen. But the rodents - a mixture of rats and squirrels - were utterly irresistible. She tried to catch them with her paw, and, finally, climbed up to the screen and tried to get behind it to where the rodents "were".

I'm not sure whether she was entertained by all this digital predation or just frustrated that she couldn't taste the sweet blood of her victims, but either way we all had quite the diverting half hour before we cut the cord, she looked at us with disgust, and jumped down to lick her backside.

Cats, go figure.

But now people? 

You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 670, Verse 1

The genesis of this post is another one, a general discussion of a variety of topics over at Nancy Nall's place. One of the topics that came up was the uniform regulations of the Roman troops posted to Jerusalem circa 30-something A.D. Nancy - having watched some sort of television Bible series called A.D. The Bible Continues - observed that:

"...I never come away from these things unimpressed with the Roman soldiers. The ones in “A.D.,” etc. had breast plates with nipple rings on them. Yes, little rings dangling from the nipple part of the armor. I guess it’s so you can tie a rabbit’s foot there, or your keys. I know Rome was wealthy, but is it possible every Roman soldier had identical fighting gear? The production of all those leather minis and brush helmets must have been a logistical nightmare. I just figured out why the centurions wore those brush helmets. So their men could pick them out on the field of battle, right? Plan for retirement, should it ever come: Read up on that stuff."

...which given my magpie mind, my recent peculiar interest in religious incunabula, and my penchant for military history, got me thinking about the whole place of the "Roman soldiers" in the Bible stories, films, and television.

For one thing, I never really thought about it, but we just kinda assume "Oh, sure, Roman soldiers" in the Passion play. We know they'll be there, and, sure enough, there they are all in their little "Roman soldier" kit - red jumpers, hoop armor, beavertail helmet, shield-and-spear.

But their purpose isn't really to be soldiers, right? They're there to be plot devices, to be the Bad Guy's henchmen, to get our hero to his appointment with destiny.

For all that I've soldiered and been interested in soldering all my life I never really thought much about them; they're just...always there in the Bible stories, types rather than individuals, not really that much different from the freaking sheep in the freaking manger scene.

But this discussion made me actually stop and think. I was one of those spear-carrying "Roman soldier" extras and as such I can tell you; there was nothing generic to me about who I was and what I did, and those guys were soldiers just like me.

If you're the one with the sword you're not just a "Roman soldier". You're Private So-and-so of the First Contubernia, Second Centuria, Cohors I Something-or-other. Your unit, your assignment, your experience and background have a hell of a lot to do with how you look, how you act, and how you effect everyone and everything around you.

So I got to wondering; first, who would have been posted to Jerusalem that particular Passover, and, second, what would they have looked like? How would they have turned out to handle the crowds and take care of all that imperial business as it involved some troublemaking street preacher?

Here's how the makers of this Bible series (called A.D. The Bible Continues, by the way) think that they should have looked.

You'll note that its your basic Level 1 Hollywood-Roman; senior officers in the fancy breastplate (called a lorica musculata, by the way, and I don't see any nipple rings but maybe that's just me...) and the grunts in the bog-standard helmet, shield, spears, and the this-is-so-Roman hoop armor

(By the way, that sort of armor is typically called a lorica segmentata these days, but its worth noting that the term never appears in Latin documents of the period - if anything, that particular type of armor was probably just called a "lorica", although I'd pay money to know what the Roman GI's slang term for it was; the Latin equivalent of "full battle-rattle"..)

Think of every Bible epic you've ever seen from Ben Hur all the way to whatever the fuck the Veggie Tales lunacy did for Easter and that's what the "Roman soldiers" look like, right?

Okay. So. One thing we can discount right off; none of these guys would have had those movie-Roman cylindrical-rectangular shields like the guy on the left is carrying and the guys in the TV scene above are equipped with.

The rectangular scutum was a purely legionary piece of equipment, and so far as we know there were no legionary troops in the province of Judea that year. I poked around a bit and what I came up with from various Internet sources was that - given that Judea was pretty minor province and not one on or near a threatening frontier enemy like Sarmatia, Dacia, or the German tribes – the closest actual legions were in Syria. As far as I can tell the Roman infantry troops in Judea in the time of the events of this television series were not legionaries but auxilia.

The auxilia were not, as you might think, light troops or irregulars. They were armed and organized as the legions, and their primary distinction was that they were typically recruited from non-citizen volunteers; the legionary troops had to be Roman-Romans, citizens. By the 1st Century AD the auxiliaries were typically recruited either from Italians (who would have been Roman citizens by then, too, though) or non-citizen non-Latins from Roman provinces. Few would have been actual barbari, the wild men from outside the Empire

That's them above. Notice how much the guys look like legionaries? Only the round shield (clipeus) gives them away. Anyway, it appears that the Judea garrison was the equivalent of a brigade - three cohors, the equivalent of a modern infantry battalion - two in Jerusalem and the third in Caesarea, the Roman capital.

Among the units I read are known to have been posted to Judea are Cohors I Sebastenorum (supposedly recruited from Samaria, the hilly region of modern northeastern Israel - "good Samaritans", remember?), Cohors Prima Italica Civium Romanorum, Cohors Secunda Italica Civium Romanorum and Cohors Prima Augusta. The first two would have been originally non-Romans but Roman allies or vassals - what were called socii or "allies" - recruited from the Italian peninsula. After the Social Wars some of these units were given Roman citizenship, hence the coveted "civium Romanorum" designation. An ala (battalion) of cavalry was also reported to have been stationed in Judea, Ala I Sebastenorum that was also said to have been recruited in Samaria.

So...basically these guys weren’t ash-and-trash, but they also weren’t legion infantry. So they would have probably gotten older, non-spec equipment that the guys from Legio X Fretensis handed down to them, or procured their own from local contractors.

Because the 1st Century Roman Army was similar to the modern U.S. Army in that its equipment was produced by civilian contractors; not until the 3rd Century AD did actual government manufactories appear to supply the forces. The legion would have had a number of local armorers making their kit, and apparently repairing what they had – archaeological finds have included armor that showed signs of alterations or repairs made some time after the original construction – who were probably given some sort of pattern or guidance that showed what the “issue” arms and armor were supposed to look like. So there was SOME uniformity. But the armor finds typically show small differences related to the local guy making it. And armor in particular was expensive and hard to make, so it tended to be kept around and re-issued even after newer models were introduced.

In particular, you'll note that in the picture from the TV show that the Roman EMs are ALL shown wearing that hoop armor - which is another Hollywoodism. Archaeology and most historians I've read suggest that eastern Roman soldiers probably wore some version of scale or lamellar armor (lorica squamata) or the chainmail (lorica hamata) that the auxiliaries are wearing in the picture just above. Everybody in the The Bible Continues-version of the Roman Army is uniformed exactly alike, and alike in the hoop-armor way.

But how likely was that? Combining the local-manufacture issue with the Eastern-style-scale-armor likelihood and the armor-is-spendy-so-older-models-tend-to-hang-around-the-supply-room thing my guess is that in a typical Roman auxiliary squad in Jerusalem circa 30AD you’d probably have found a couple of guys with mail, another maybe one or two with the hoop-armor, and a bunch more with scale armor.

Similar? Yes? Identical, like modern troops? No.

But making your TV Romans look like that is hard on the prop person and not the Hollywood image of "Roman soldier", so instead we get the Hollywood version on the electronic teevee.

So we already know that the TV Romans are dressed as legionaries and not as the auxiliaries they should be, and they all look waayyyy more uniform than an actual Roman auxiliary outfit would have. What else might have looked different from the Hollywood version?

I should add that to make matters more difficult for us to figure this out our actual understanding of Roman dress and equipment is far from complete. A big part of the problem is that we have such little actual physical evidence of daily life in the Roman Army.

Statuary depictions were usually carved by sculptors who had only the local troopers to go by, if that (my understanding is that most military historians are of the opinion that many of the depictions on Trajan’s Column, for example, were done by Roman artisans who hadn’t seen many of the soldiers they depicted and guessed or inferred the uniforms and equipment from the ones that HAD, such as the guard units stationed in the capital that would have looked very little like frontline troopers).

The written documentation is often incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Because of the perishability of metal archaeological finds are typically sparse – the Kalkriese excavations I wrote about in the Teutoburg engagement back in 2008 have produced some tremendous revelations about legionary kit in the 1st Century AD simply because of the concentration and association of legionary metal artifacts.

So with what little physical evidence we have I'm left with trying to infer what might have been the “inherent military probability” of a detachment commander tasked with sending a couple of companies (centuria) on personal security detail with the local military governor. What would I have done, in his caligae?

Well, my guess is that, given the relative quiet of Jerusalem at the moment I’d have had the boys kitted out in their “Number 2″ or “Class B” uniform; not the fanciest parade outfits – that would have been too likely to get mussed tussling with unruly crowds or, worse, sold in the marketplace by Private Marcus whose thirst for wine, carelessness with issue equipment, and tendency to manage to exchange the latter for the former was notorious – but with their best field gear and sidearms only. I'd want them to look good, but not so fancy that if riot control was required that they'd be hampered by expensive and delicate parade geegaws that, if lost or damaged, would have to be replaced or repaired or worse - come out of my unit's fucking budget. The Hades with that for a game of soldiers.

The pila spear would be more of a nuisance than a benefit in an urban operation-other-than-war environment, so they’d likely get left in the barracks. Aid-to-the-civil-power-order, then: helmet without the fancy parade plumes (but officers with their sidewise helmet-brush, though, to look the smarter), lorica, clipeus and gladius-only would be my bet. So these guys fumbling with shield and spear? Not really.

I'll bet that at least one of the centuria would have been tasked as a reaction force in full combat kit – shield and pilum and all – somewhere close by in case real trouble started. Since what we know from the scriptural sources suggests that didn’t happen, however, my guess is that any sort of depiction of the Romans in the bible stories that shows them with shield-and-spear is pure Hollywood.

Does this really matter a lick? Of course not; the people who made this Bible-epic aren't telling history, they're telling a Bible story. Expecting them to fuss about accuracy is like expecting logic from an animated cartoon; pleasant when encountered but not really required.

Or, as a certain famous Bible-guy is supposed to have said: "Truth? Dude, like, WTF is that..?"

Duck and Cover

I got more than a little bit of a laugh out of this:

"Robertson, the patriarch of the backwater Louisiana clan on the reality show about hunting, fishing and domestic squabbles, was put on indefinite "hiatus" by A&E for his remarks to GQ magazine characterizing homosexuality as sinful behavior."

But it did bring a couple of things to mind that I wanted to throw out for the comment-hounds to gnaw on.

First, I think that the Snarky Penguin^TM has the right overall take on this whole ridiculous magilla:

"Phil Robertson is who he is, and always will be that person. He could have been steered towards realizing why his statements were offensive to so many people, and perhaps even apologized, but now that A&E has canned him for the exact same reason they hired him, well. Guess that teachable moment didn’t last too long, did it?"

Ol' redneck bible-banging dude believes stuff that ol' redneck bible-banging dudes often believe?

Whoa! Stop the presses! Film at 11!

Second, what is kind of irritating to me is how this brings up, again, how many "Christians" seem to have a bug up their ass about who goes up whose ass (or who's licking whose coochie, if the "whos" are lady-whos) or who is vacuuming out little blastocyst- and embryo-Americans as a feature of their faith.

Now I'm as unchurched as a mole rat but my gaffer, my mom's father, was a Salvation Army officer, a hardcore Jesus-pesterer with a degree in Jesus-pestering to prove it. Somewhere I've still got the awesome old King James Bible he gave me as a kiddo and I even read the thing (mostly for the smutty parts of the Old Testament but, still...) and I don't recall Jesus ever saying anything to the effect "Cursed are the faggots, for they bone each other up the butt and made me cry when I was a baby."

He doesn't even mention suctioning babies out of ladies' insides probably because, well, back in those days the ol' man just took Rebekah out behind the manger and kicked her in the belly to abort the little sprog (or she whipped up some nasty sort of abortifacient which killed either her child or her - either way the family didn't have another mouth to feed, which was often the point...)

Either way, the Reason for the Season didn't have much to say on either point.

Rich people, though?

Powerful people? The Galilean 1%? The Son-o-God has a pantsload to say about those fuckers and none of it good.

"You cannot serve both God and Money" he says. "There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." and then adds:

"My children," he said to them, "how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." They were more astonished than ever. "In that case," they said to one another, "who can be saved?" Jesus gazed at them. "For men," he said, "it is impossible, but not for God: because everything is possible for God... Many who are first will be last, and the last first."

No question there - The Christ is telling his believers; you want riches? You want power? You want to be a Big Star?

Forget me, then. I'm the guy who pals with lepers, prostitutes, and sinners.

You need to worry more about your poor brothers and less about where your next million is coming from.

So. Given his boss's directives, who did the old crackerfamilias (God love Charles Pierce, I tell ya...) tell his interviewer were going to Hell? Let's roll tape:

"Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right."

So the Robertson Hell Bucket List includes: three sexual offenders (adulterers, whores - but only rent-boys, and homos), idol worshippers (you know how those Baal-bangers are such a PITA nowadays), two economic offenders (greedheads and swindlers), drunks, and slanderers.

So Phil didn't let the wealthy off completely but his ire at those rich men his personal Savior says won't be there when He returns in Glory is outnumbered 6-2 by his irritation with people who put their totem pole in the wrong donut hole or who are sacrificing to Athena.

WTF?

I guess that's what irks the shit out of me about this.

My take on the New Testament is pretty clear; the whole deal is about Christ and his sacrifice. And central to Christ's teaching is the notion that the Lord loves him some poor and humble. That the single easiest way to earn yourself a one-way ticket to the Lake of Fire is to be a rich, selfish dickhead.

But...all the furor I hear, all the billboards I see, all the T-shirts, the televangelist rants, the Fox News crap, the whacko Rightwingnut books, the Teatard tricorn-hat-waving, and now even duck guy interviews...all the heat seems to be on things sexual.

So I guess my ultimate take on Phil Robertson and his stated beliefs is; dude, if you're more worried about doin's of "Adam and Steve" than the greedy, grasping Servants of Mammon?

Christianity; U R doing it Wrong.

Oh, and just as a parting observation:

I learned to hunt from the Master Chief, who himself learned to hunt growing up back in the Depression, when a 10-cent shotgun shell meant dinner that would cost half a buck at the butcher's shop. I'm really a terrible shot, and nobody but me at the Fire Direction Center likes duck, and the first lessons the Master Chief taught me about wingshooting were 1) kill cleanly, and 2) don't kill what you can't eat. So I don't hunt a hell of a lot.

But I enjoy hunting. I love the dawn light, the birds coming in over the dekes with their wings cupped for landing, the satisfaction of making a tough shot, and the taste of mallard breast fresh from the field. So every so often I drag out the waders and the deke bag and go.

And here's the thing.

From twenty years of observation and practice, I've kinda figured out that a fucking duck call is a fucking duck call.

A duck call is an extreme case of the operator being a thousand times more critical than the equipment.

I've seen a great caller coax greenheads down out of a bluebird sky onto a half-assed set of decoys under a blind that wouldn't have fooled a retarded scaup.

I've also heard a shitty caller quack his lungs out while the birds sail past overhead, probably making high-school-level-duck-jokes about the voice of that duck-derp on the pond down there.

You don't need a goddamn one-hundred-and-eighty-fucking-dollar duck call to call fucking ducks.

You need to know how to call ducks.

So if this is ol' Phil's racket?

Shaking down wanna-be Nimrods with more money than sense with 180-buck duck calls?

He should probably stop and have a little chat with his buddy Jesus. His Savior-pal might have something fairly cutting to say about those piling up riches here on Earth.

All's I'm sayin'.

À une Mendiante rousse

I probably pay no more attention to the whole "Miss America" business - pageant, contestants, winner, public appearances, scholarship, the associated hoopla - as the average American male of my age and history. That being, unless said Miss is involved in some sort of scandal involving nude pictures of her ownself...

...absolutely none.

I have utterly no idea who this year's "Miss Oregon" is (Allison Elizabeth Cook of Klamath Falls, for those of you interested, who is all of nineteen and either attends or attended Oregon Institute of Technology and who ran on the "platform issue" of Brain Injury Awareness - isn't the Internet amazing..?) or who last year's Miss America was (Mallory Hagen, Miss New York, whose winning performance included performing a tap dance routine to James Brown's "Get Up Offa That Thing" while wearing a latex rodeo outfit. She's twenty-five) or, well, pretty much anything about Miss America.

So you can trust me when I say that when I channel-surfed onto the 2014 Miss America show Sunday night it was purely by accident.

I'd had a busy day and was ready for sleep, anyway. My bride, however, likes to have a television oblongata as she fiddles with her tablet. I asked her which she preferred, the old movie on TCM or the Misses Americas and she chose the latter.

I watched a little of the opening of the show, which seemed to consist of groups of the young ladies doing a sort of one-too-many-mojitos-at-the-bachelorette-party dance

(you know the sort of thing, a lot of arm-waving and hip-circling along with tottery aimless little steps? Yeah, that.)

at various locales and stepping forward to introduce themselves. This consisted of a two- or three-sentence snippet that started with some sort of topical reference to the contestant's home state and then her connection to it; "Listening to your phone calls from the nation's capital. Just kidding! I'm Miss District of Columbia, Bindhu Pamarthi." or "Our Utah Jazz sure aren't bringing home the championship. Guess It's up to me! Ciera Pekarcik, Miss Utah."

The actual contest venue was in some sort of anonymous auditorium - presumably in Atlantic City, since isn't the whole idea to bring the tourists to the boardwalk and crimp their money? - buried beneath a ziggurat of glitter and lights with some sort of generic male-and-female hosting-type creatures and Miss 2013 Mallory Hagen in a crown and a white dress looking rather queen-like though not in a drag-queeny sort of way.

And, of course, all the contestant Misses Whereevers doing their bachelorette-party dance again, only this time in identical short dark dresses.

I watched all this in a fairly stupefied fashion. It just seemed excessive and I was reminded rather forcefully of that awful Sandra Bullock film Miss Congeniality and got a chuckle out of that.

The massed gyrating ranks of Miss American womanhood, however, seemed faintly intimidating. I assume there were only 53 of them - all the states plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands - but they seemed like a Multitude.

Perhaps because for all that they were as different from each other as Americans are different from each other (at least you could see in hair and skin color every place of origin from Europe to Africa to Asia and every admixture in-between...) they all seemed frighteningly alike.

Tall, or at least so slender as to seem tall, slim with endless slender arms and long legs. Perfect, glossy hair and lots of it. Gleaming teeth, shining eyes, flawless skin. Perfectly fitted into their perfectly tailored outfits, perfect feet shod in perfect shoes.

Perfection, and lots of it.

I went to read in bed.

A while later Mojo came in and pottered about making her nightly pre-sleep preparations. Finally she plumped down on the bed with a happy sigh.

"What did you think?" she asked.

"About what?" I said, putting Atkinson and my reading glasses on the nightstand.

"Of the swimsuits?" she said. "You're kidding. Didn't you see any of the swimsuit part?"

"No, I left before the thing really got started. How did the fembots look in their swimmies?"

"Very sleek." Mojo tipped her head and looked at me slantendicular. "You didn't even sneak a look at the swimsuit competition?"

"Nah. I know what fembots look like in their swimsuits, and I wanted to finish this chapter."

Mojo snorted. "Sure. You tell me you don't find watching them at all sexy?"

And that stopped me. I actually had to think about that for a moment.

Because when you get right down to it, that's really what all the beauty pageant business is about, isn't it? Sure, there's a lot of guff in the prospectus about talent and poise and style, sure, there are points for interviews and "platforms" and there's a scholarship...but the bottom line is that these women are there because they are beautiful, because they are endmembers of a certain human ideal of appearance, attitude, and aptitude, and the whole point is that they are "Miss America"; the sort of young, single woman that is supposed to be an American ideal.

So as a "Mister America" it seemed logical that these young women were supposed to appeal to me intellectually, emotionally, and - if not most importantly at least importantly - physically.

I should find them desirable. Sexually desirable.

And the more I thought about it the less true that seems, and it made me wonder why.

Pretty? Sure. Well-groomed? Yep.

Sexy?

Not really.

What the hell was wrong with me, then? These were by all appearances healthy, vigorous young women with bodies that appeared (from Mojo's viewing of them in their swimsuits, anyway) perfectly fit and feminine. Knowing how us guys like to look at you girls, well, there should have been an element of sexual attraction there. I should have looked at the Misses America and wanted to roll about naked with at least one of them, right?

I just didn't feel it and it took me a while to pinpoint why not.

It was, for me, anyway, the sheer perfection of those bodies and the women within them.

In those sleek contestants there seemed to be not a hint of human oddity, not a whisper of offhand intimacy, not a scrap of careless desire. All was taut expectation; poised, controlled, and precise. The contestants, the contest, and the broadcasters had done a perfect job of eliminating any shred of human weakness or imperfection.

And the more I thought about it the more accurate, and the less arousing, that perfection seemed. Although for all I know any number of these women might well be bright, funny, warm, desirable people you couldn't tell that from what you saw on television. All you saw was perfection.

And it is imperfection - for me, anyway - that fuels desire.

It's not a perfect ass or perfect breasts or perfect legs or a perfect face; its the ass that belongs to the woman curled up beside me companionably doing a sudoku, or leaning frowsy and warm against a morning countertop, scratching that bottom while she waits for the coffee to brew.

Its the way the parabola of those imperfect breasts shake as she straddles my hips and tells bad jokes and laughs at her own hilarity. Its the feel of those legs twined around my own, or the look on that face as it is drawn in concentration, or lightens in pleasant relaxation, or lours at me with incipient lust.

It is the sudden intimacy of a glimpse inside her half-opened bathrobe, or of the unperfect arc of her calf diving into her furry socks that keep her feet warm on a chilly evening.

Don't get me wrong. I "get it", the human ability to desire an anonymous ideal body, a perfect "zipless fuck". I'm not a marble saint; I've looked at women and thought carnal thoughts.

But...those women tend to be everyday, ordinary women whose everyday bodies, as imperfect and ordinary as my own, seem infinitely more desirable than the most perfect Miss Somewhere whose gelid smile and serene glance seems to free them from the earthy everydayness I share with their imperfect sisters.

I won't pretend I had figured all this out last night as a settled beside the warmth of my sleeping bride. But I think perhaps I had the main of it, in the lazy flush of warm, undemanding passion I felt for her.

No one will ever gaze in awe at her perfect skin, or marvel at the tautness of her perfect breasts. She will never again have the sleek vigor of youth. She will never wear America's crown of womanly perfection.

But to me she is infinitely, imperfectly desirable, far beyond the rank upon rank of perfect Misses.

To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl

Little white girl with red hair,
The holes in your frock
Show poverty
And beauty,

For me, a poor poet,
Your young and ailing body,
Spotted with, freckles,
Has its sweetness.

You carry more gallantly,
Than can a queen of fiction
Her high-boots of velvet,
Your heavy clogs.

In place of rags too short for you,
May a fine court costume
Be drawn in blustering, long folds
At your heels;

In place of stockings in holes,
May a dagger of gold
Glitter for the eyes of rakes
On your leg;

May barely fastened knots
Reveal for our sinning
Your lovely breasts, radiant
As two eyes;

May, to undress yourself,
Your arms require coaxing
And may they archly repel
Mischievous fingers,

May pearls of finest water,
Sonnets by Belleau,
Be ceaselessly proffered
By your enslaved lovers,

Trains of servant rhymers,
Dedicating first lines to you
And watching your slipper
Under the staircase,

Many a flunkey struck at random,
Many a lord and many a Ronsard
Would spy to seduce it,
Your tender retreat!

You would count more kisses
Than lilies in your beds
And you would hold in sway
More than one Valois!

— Meanwhile you go begging
Some old rubbish lying
On the threshold of some
Vulgar Véfour;

You go gaping past your shoulder
At twenty-nine sou jewels
Of which, I cannot, I am sorry,
Make a gift to you.

Go then, without other ornament,
Perfume, pearls or diamonds,
Than your emaciated nudity,
O my beauty!

~ Charles Baudelaire

Squirtle Unchained

The grandparents are here this weekend, so it's been all socializing and entertaining and doing things that will produce grandchild adorability to entrance grandparents. So you can imagine how little of "everything else" I'm getting done.

One thing that did occur to me while I was doing all this kid-and-grandparents stuff.

I really hate the hell out of Pokémon.

You're familiar with this kid thing, right? It's basically a card-combat game that has franchised out into movies and television. There's about a gajillion versions of Pokémon crap; cards, books, movies, and a television show. The Boy is a semi-regular Pokémon consumer. He "plays" the card game tho he cheats like a goddamn investment banker (he just ignores rules he doesn't like) and he watches the movies and the television show.

It's not the incoherent "plot" or the ridiculous characters that get me about this silly thing; it's the entire premise.

Which is about enslaving fictional animals and forcing them to fight each other.

Sound nasty? That's because it is.

I've mentioned this to the Boy who agrees, shrugs his shoulders, and goes off to watch another episode. He gets that this is a goofy Japanese anime' series and geez, pop, quit being such a derp.

But the whole Pokémon macguffin drives me kinda nuts.

The premise, if you've never encountered it, is simple, as the Wiki entry says:

"...a Trainer that encounters a wild Pokémon is able to capture that Pokémon by throwing a specially designed, mass-producible spherical tool called a Poké Ball at it. If the Pokémon is unable to escape the confines of the Poké Ball, it is officially considered to be under the ownership of that Trainer. Afterwards, it will obey whatever its new master commands, unless the Trainer demonstrates such a lack of experience that the Pokémon would rather act on its own accord."

And what these mooks command is that these critters fight each other.

So this is basically Spartacus only with freakish little cartoon monsters. To make it a little more palatable the little buggers don't fight to the death; they are "knocked out" - by getting blasted with lightning or fried with fire. Tell me that you get your ass zapped by a Pikachu lightning bolt and see how "knocked out" you feel.

And don't get me started on Pikachu, the Vidkun Quisling of the Pokémon universe. He pals around with the TV series hero kid and helps him zap and beatdown the various people and critters he meets. He's a Judas Goat, betraying and helping his buddy Ash enslave new gladiators.

The entire notion squicks me out.

I won't put the thing off-limits, but I do try and make the point that the central idea of Pokémon is based on a notion that civilized people pretty much tossed into the trash heap of history hundreds of years ago.

He nods and smiles and ignores me completely.

I still want to think that there's some alternative Pokémon universe where Squirtle gives Ash the finger, kicks Pikachu's little rat ass and stomps off down the road vowing to fight for his own Pokédamned reasons or never again.

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