The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for July 2005

Learn To Live With What You Can’t Rise Above

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“Learn To Live With What You Can’t Rise Above” is a riff from Springsteen’s song Tunnel of Love. It is one of my favorites because he does such a good job of painting a picture. It drives me into thoughts about the past and the present, takes me to places I haven’t been for a while. I dig that kind of stuff.

As a native of California it almost always makes me think of the beach. I close my eyes and I can hear them, those girls from the past juxtaposed with the present. So many good memories that helped to make me who I am today. And at the same time I think about the memories that I am going to create. Wild stuff.

My daughter turned a year today. The princess is officially twelve months old and my head is spinning. Today I sat her down on my lap and explained again that I am her daddy and that my job is to keep her safe and help her grow into a beautiful woman on character and integrity.

For a moment I felt a twinge because I had included ‘beautiful’ in my description of who I wanted her to become. It felt a little superficial to focus on that, but at the same time the reality is that women and beauty are tied in together. It may not be good or nice, but beautiful women have an easier time and I want good things for my daughter.

I explained to her that even though she is gorgeous she has to work hard every day and that she must always use her brain, every day is a day for learning. While we were having our talk some boy tried to get her attention. He was 11 months, so I told him to get lost for the next 35 years. He can come back when he has an education and a decent job. That scamp put his hand on my daughter’s leg and then she let him have it, gave him a decent tug and almost came away with some hair.

Her grandmother complained to me that if I continue this behavior no boys are going to want to be friendly and I smiled. Think of the Cheshire Cat and you can see my grin. Grandma tried to remind me that I didn’t like it when the fathers were tough on me and I told her that it didn’t matter and that I always found a way around them.

After saying “DOH!” and experiencing a brief moment of foolishness as I remembered how motivating hormones could be I grabbed her older brother and reminded him that he is training, always in training to serve as her bodyguard. Other boys must be stopped.

Ok, I didn’t say that, but I did mutter “I am doomed” two or three times. Daughters, daughters, daughters. By the time she gets old enough to date I am going to have to suffer a mental lapse and forget every experience/thought I had with women that wasn’t related to education, cleaning or some other nondescript thing that will not remind me that some boy on hormonal overdrive is leering at my daughter.

Happy Birthday Baby Girl, your daddy loves you.

More About the Disengagement

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I thought that some of these articles were interesting. You can see Biur Chametz’ theory about why Sharon is acting as he is over here.

Zev wrote about his experiences on a march from Jerusalem to Kfar Maimon and Gush Katif, including some nice pictures. That is available here.

Rabbi Daniel Gordis has another take on this that I found to be quite interesting, enough that I wanted to include an excerpt for you. The full story can be found here. I found it to be very powerful.

“The future is now, I told myself as I watched the news (much more than I should have) throughout the week. There would come a time, we all knew, when the question of whether Israel would be democratic or Jewish would ultimately be put to the test. But that test, I’d thought, would come from Israel’s Arabs. They’re about 20% of the population now, just as
they were in 1949 at the end of the War of Independence. But we’ve had massive waves of immigration since then. More than 700,000 Jews evicted from Arab countries at first, followed by the Ethiopians, a million Russians, and many more. And still, Israeli Arabs have kept pace, not primarily through immigration, but rather, just with birthrates much higher than ours.

So now that mass immigration to Israel is over (there’s only one numerically significant Jewish Diaspora community left, and it’s not going to come in any meaningful numbers), what will stop Israel’s Arabs, who are justifiably not terribly committed Zionists, from becoming 25% and then 30% and then 35% of the population? And as that number grows, what will we do when they have powerful political sway? Do we honor the democracy of the country, even if that means eroding the Jewish content of the State? Or do we protect the Jewish character of Israel, and
somehow curtail the democracy? Not a simple scenario, but not an avoidable one, either. One that will, without question, eventually force us to decide which of the two matters most to us. And one that in so doing, will force us to decide what kind of country this will be.

The only good news was, we thought, that we had a few years before we’d have to face that problem. (This is a country quite expert at dealing with the urgent at the expense of the important.) But we were wrong. Because the issue came to a hear this week. Not because of the Arabs, but because of the Jews. This was the week when two of the most prominent rabbis in Israel ordered their students to refuse orders related to the disengagement. When soldiers were interviewed and responded that yes, they take their orders seriously, but what can they
do when their rabbis tells them that Torah commands otherwise? When, in retaliation, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said he would dismantle hesder yeshiva programs where the rabbis taught their students to refuse orders.

This was the week, in short, when the secular government and its army (in which many religious Jews continued to serve) aligned against the almost monolithically religious bloc, each declaring that it would not back down, each declaring that the other was a threat to the State of
Israel. It was the week of rabbis versus commanders, the week (or so it seemed to many secular observers) of those loyal to the State versus those loyal to God. It was, in short, the week that Israel’s democracy began to die.

But, it will be said, democracy won, no? After three sweltering days, without bathrooms or enough water for 50,000 people camped out in the desert in Kfar Maimon, a town left utterly in tatters by the siege which took place in its midst, the orange wearing protesters gave up, didn’t
they? They went home, and lost. Didn’t democracy win?

No, I don’t think democracy won. Democracy didn’t win because the cat is out of the bag. Leaders of this society openly flaunt the government’s rule, and no one seems surprised. The heroes of the two communities are now radically different. This was the week when loyal
Zionists declared as heroes those soldiers who abandoned their units.

Democracy didn’t win because in a functioning democracy, it shouldn’t require 20,000 troops and police to stop people from entering an area that the army has declared closed. In a functioning democracy, people might protest. March. Hold signs. Even block roads. But openly
declare that they will enter areas the army says are forbidden? Siphon away forces that are critically needed in the war on terror? And encourage their children to literally change sides, leaving their units and joining the protesters?

No, democracy didn’t win. Because they’ll be back. Sooner or later, and maybe during the disengagement, they’ll likely amass again, and in addition to everything else the army has to do, it will have to assign 20,000 troops to stop the masses. And democracy didn’t win, because the
country simply got lucky that the protesters gave up. What if they hadn’t? What if they had tried to push by the fence, and beyond the human chain? Dare we imagine what heat, exhaustion, dehydration and passions can do in the desert with 50,000 people in a tiny area?

And no, democracy didn’t win, because the government was no better. There is something unsettling about so many troops stopping civilians, even if it was said to be necessary. Why do these photos of thousands of soldiers blocking a protest remind me more of Tiananmen Square than of Israel? And by virtue of what authority did Ariel Sharon (or whoever it was) stop the buses that were to bring the protesters to congregate? Is it now illegal to hire a bus to take people to a protest? These buses weren’t stopped near Gaza. They weren’t stopped near a border. They were stopped all over the country, smack in the middle of internationally-recognized sovereign Israel. Now it’s illegal to drive the bus if the government doesn’t like the purpose? By virtue of what right did soldiers and police stop the buses, and confiscate the driver’s licenses of the drivers, who had broken no laws?

Was this the week in which we learned that at the end of the day, neither side takes democracy or the rule of law terribly seriously? And if that’s the case, what’s going to happen as the disengagement grows closer? And worse, what’s going to happen when the next disengagement begins to unfold? “What?”, it will be said. “The “next” disengagement?! How?” After all, Ariel Sharon has said it explicitly — “No more disengagements.”

Right. And Bill Clinton didn’t “have relations with that woman.” That, too, was technically true. But it all depends on how you define “relations” and “disengagements.” It’ll be different. It’ll be the wall. The fence. The barrier. Call it what you will, but it’s clear that like it or not, that’s going to be the new border on the east. Maybe sooner. Maybe later. But that’s what’s planned. And when everyone else wakes up and smells the roses, and realizes that we’re going to move not just 6,000 people from Gaza, but hundreds of thousands (including many far more radicalized than those who live in Gaza) from the West Bank. What then? Who’s going to do what then? Will it stop at three heat-soaked parched days in the desert? Or will we see the unspeakable?

It was the kind of week that makes you wonder just what’s been going on here. Is nuance, in the belief that law and democracy are the only hopes this place has, really that far gone? “

Last of WWII Comanche Code Talkers Dies

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These guys were heroes.

OKLAHOMA CITY – Charles Chibitty, the last survivor of the Comanche code talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, has died. He was 83.

Chibitty, who had been residing at a Tulsa nursing home, died Wednesday, said Cathy Flynn, administrative assistant in the Comanche Nation tribal chairman’s office.

The group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton area were selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not decipher. Like the larger group of Navajo Indians who performed a similar service in the Pacific theater, the Comanches were dubbed “code talkers.”

“It’s strange, but growing up as a child I was forbidden to speak my native language at school,” Chibitty said in 2002. “Later my country asked me to. My language helped win the war and that makes me very proud. Very proud. “

In a 1998 story for The Oklahoman, Chibitty recalled being at Normandy on D-Day, and said someone once asked him what he was afraid of most and if he feared dying.

“No. That was something we had already accepted,” he said.

“But we landed in deeper water than anticipated. A lot of boys drowned. That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I wonder what the hell Hitler thought when he heard those strange voices,” he once told a gathering.

Chibitty was born Nov. 20, 1921, near Medicine Park and attended high school at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kan. He enlisted in 1941.

In 1999, Chibitty received the Knowlton Award, which recognizes individuals for outstanding intelligence work, during a ceremony at the Pentagon’s ‘s Hall of Heroes.

“We could never do it again,” Chibitty told Oklahoma Today. “It’s all electronic and video in war now.”

Snake In The Toilet

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Talk about unexpected surprises.

“The fear factor is high at one Florida home – the family is afraid of going to the bathroom, and for good reason. Alicia Bailey was bitten by, what appears to be, a large water moccasin hiding in the toilet bowl in the middle of the night. The poisonous snake bit her thigh after she lifted the lid sending her to the hospital for three days.

No one knows how the snake got there, or where it went after that, so the family is a little jumpy these days. Richard Bailey tells us, “We’re not looking to take it alive – I just want it out of here.” Alicia adds, “We’re currently very uncomfortable in our home – and toilet-shy, I would say, and real anxious for closure.”

The Bailey’s eleven-year-old son is now staying with neighbors, because doctors say, he would die if he were bitten by a snake that size. “

Fragments of Fiction- A New Addition

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For those of you who are suffering through Fragments of Fiction I have just finished the newest installment. You can find it here or you can just read it below. I am not real happy with this and may rework it all, I don’t know.

Some of this is so cheesy, it is embarrassing.

For many years she had avoided thinking about the end of her time with the boy. He had touched her in so many places, made her think about things, about life in a way that no one else had. She had given herself to him so completely, so deeply that in some ways it was hard to see where she ended and he began.

It was more than love and more than trust. There was a connection between them that she couldn’t verbalize or explain to anyone. She loved to watch him. He didn’t have to be doing anything in particular, it just made her feel good to watch him. There was something mesmerizing about him and it wasn’t any one thing.

When her friends would ask what she found so attractive she would stumble and stutter because she didn’t know how to empty the contents of her heart, how to share the things that you feel but cannot say.

So she would speak of his eyes and his wrists. She would talk about the way his lips felt on hers and how when she hugged him she felt never felt safer. She told them about how he looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that when he put his hand on her hip she felt electricity.

Sometimes she wanted to say more. Sometimes she wanted to tell them everything that she felt because it seemed selfish not to share something so amazing and wonderful with them. And in some way it was so hard not to try and bond with them over something so important to her.

In the end she never did share any of that with them. She came close one day but faltered when her girlfriend suggested that all girls felt this way about their first. It bothered her because she felt that it cheapened and degraded what she had so she just smiled and said nothing.

The end of their relationship had damaged her. It had broken her in ways that she didn’t really understand until many years later. The men that followed the boy were measured against his memory. At first it was conscious, but subconscious. That is, she couldn’t help but compare them and though she knew it was unfair she persisted in the unconscious search for the one who would make her forget the pain and the empty feeling.

It was an empty hollow feeling. There was a sense of things having been turned upside down. It reminded her of something she had seen on a field trip she took in second grade. They had gone to the zoo and were in the reptile house looking at turtles. The zookeeper turned his back and one of the boys took the turtle and flipped it upside down.

She remembered watching the turtle flop around, legs kicking in the air as it tried desperately to right itself. And it occurred to her that she felt a little bit like the turtle. In some ways her world had barely changed and in others it had been turned upside down.

After the breakup it was months before she let another boy kiss her. It was horribly awkward and uncomfortable. He grabbed her and shoved his tongue in her mouth while his hands roamed all over her body. She wanted to push him away and run but she was tired of crying herself to sleep and thought that if could endure this it might help her move on.

It did not.

And neither did the boy who came along that summer or the three that followed him.

The problem was that subconsciously she was still looking for him. When they kissed her she would close her eyes and try to lose herself in the moment but all of the little details made it clear that they were not him. They smelled differently, their breathing had a different rhythm and their touch was not quite right.

It was a long time before she allowed any of them to do more than kiss her and that was only because she forced herself to. It had been almost two years and she had decided that her university life had to have something more to it than studying and casual dating.

For a time it worked. For a time she felt like things were better and that she might be able to fall in love again. And in a way she did. The cloud that had followed her lifted a little and the sun began to shine again.

But in her heart she knew that it was never quite as sunny and that the skies were not quite so blue as they had been. The jagged hole didn’t hurt the same way it had used to and the familiarity of the pain was replaced with something else.

Now with the grace of time and distance she was finally able to see that the relationships that followed had all been doomed because she had been unwilling to let them work. It made her nervous and she wondered if she had spent so many years teaching herself how to be more detached that we would never be able to really give herself to someone again.

“She put him out like the burnin’ end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart he spent his whole life tryin’ to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night

He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees
We found him with his face down in the pillow
With a note that said I’ll love her till I die
And when we buried him beneath the willow
The angels sang a whiskey lullaby

(Sing lullaby)

The rumors flew but nobody knew how much she blamed herself
For years and years she tried to hide the whiskey on her breath
She finally drank her pain away a little at a time
But she never could get drunk enough to get him off her mind
Until the night

She put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away his memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength she had to get up off her knees
We found her with her face down in the pillow
Clinging to his picture for dear life
We laid her next to him beneath the willow
While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby”

(Sing lullaby)

Whiskey Lullaby- Brad Paisley