War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn - Book Review

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion By Jeff Guinn

The Mexican/United States border has aggressive money/land grabbing opportunists, mostly political and corporate, on both sides each lacking human empathy. This has been ongoing through good times and bad. There might not be any good guys and the poor will always be the looser.

It has been said that it is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Also might is right.

An excellent history lesson and must read book.

Excerpts:

All of the major fighting took place on Mexican soil, and the better-equipped and -organized American forces prevailed.

Veracruz in Mexican history. In 1519, Cortez brought his invaders ashore there, launching three centuries of enslavement by Spain. Veracruz was where America landed many of its troops during a war that took half of Mexico’s territory. The French occupied Veracruz in 1864 as the first step in its Mexican conquest. The American arrival in 1914 was assumed to signal another full-fledged invasion. American military commanders in the field certainly thought so, and were surprised to receive orders to remain in Veracruz instead of next striking 230 miles west at Mexico City.

1847, Mexico was forced to negotiate a peace settlement the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, America came away with almost one million square miles of new territory that included all or part of what would become the states of California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, plus the Nueces Strip, which remained so uninviting that General William T. Sherman subsequently suggested that “we should go to war again, to make them take it back.”

In return for about half of its nation, Mexico received $15 million, plus the cancellation of another $3.25 million in American business claims. The country’s leaders did what they could for Mexican nationals who suddenly found themselves living in the United States.

German suggestion to Mexico of reclaimed land deliberately didn’t include California. That great prize was intended to lure Japan into a German alliance. Those two nations remained in an official state of war, but it would be ideal for the Germans if, as their unrestricted warfare throttled the Allies in Britain and Europe, Japan attacked California while Mexico assaulted Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japanese officials would be reluctant to meet with representatives of Germany, but Mexico and Japan were friendly.

Japan might be convinced to change sides, especially if the Germans dangled California as a potential reward. The Germans considered Japan’s chances of taking California far superior to Mexico’s odds of regaining any portion of the other three states, but in any event those outcomes would not be Germany’s concern. It all hinged on Carranza, and, if the United States declared war on Germany, whether his enmity for America would incline him to accept the German offer.

American diplomats in Germany routinely accepted messages, including those in code, addressed from German officials to their nation’s diplomats in Mexico.

telegrams were initially sent to the State Department in Washington; officials there passed them along to the German ambassador and his staff, who used America’s Western Union to make the final transmissions to the German embassy in Mexico City. Zimmermann’s telegram was sent through both the Swedish and U.S. transatlantic cable systems.

German leaders enjoyed the irony of the U.S. helpfully transmitting a message intended against America’s best interests.

The Germans did not know that British intelligence regularly intercepted all telegrams sent over Swedish and American cables and that Britain’s agents had cracked the German code.

The headline in the New York World was representative: “MEXICO AND JAPAN ASKED BY GERMANY TO ATTACK U.S. IF IT ENTERED THE WAR.”

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Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor - Book Review - Five Stars

 

Book Review - Five Stars

Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

This is a biographical story of Willa Cather and her tremendous literary accomplishments that have stood the test of time. My wife and I first listened to the audio book of My Ántonia years ago. We were enthralled and listened again...it was extraordinary, and then we both read the digital story on our Kindle readers. My Ántonia is a monumental and classic book worthy of more than five stars.

Before you read Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. You are in for a treat.

EXCERPTS:

No one who reads My Ántonia forgets the tale of Russian Peter and Pavel, driven from town to town and finally out of Russia after saving themselves, the last of a wedding party, by throwing the bride to a pack of wolves that have swarmed the wedding sledges: “[T]he groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and “For Ántonia and me,” says Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end.

As if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.” Nor does any reader forget poor traduced Ántonia delivering her own out-of-wedlock baby: “That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.” (What a painful, peculiar pleasure the scene gives.) It is with My Ántonia, so consecrated to memory, that Cather arrives at her deepest theme. She would have understood T. S. Eliot’s remark that we live not just in the present but in the present moment of the past, past and present being the warp and weft of all experience. The lively hoard of contingent occurrences that add up to a life is infinitely to be cherished. When little Leo, one of Ántonia’s many children, plays his grandfather’s violin, Cather’s motif of the pastness of the present and presentness of the past is consummated. “In the course of twenty crowded years,” says Jim, speaking for his maker, “one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

The book’s motto—“The best days are the soonest gone”

I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me. These old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talked more freely to a child than to grown people. I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if I had got inside another person’s skin.”

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in June 1890. She came first in a class of three and accordingly delivered the valedictory address. Her spirited theme was “Investigation versus Superstition.” She hailed the former and damned the latter.

In one as young as Willa, here only sixteen, it is unnerving: “There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation,” she declared to her audience, “a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.”

The shocking news of the fall of France in June 1940. What she’d always regarded as a second homeland had gone under. She wrote to Zoë Akins that “the heritage of all the ages is being threatened.” She followed the war with anguish, particularly the Battle of Britain that followed. Churchill was her embodiment of Periclean heroism. It was at this time that she befriended Sigrid Undset, the famed Norwegian writer and refugee from the Nazis, also a Knopf author, whose elder son, a lieutenant in the Norwegian Army, had died in the early days of the war. She liked Undset’s work and, more important, regarded her as an embodiment of the European values Nazism was laying to waste.

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They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri-Book Review

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri

This is a true political story from the prospective of a young girl who became a victim of geography with the result that her entire family and country live in constant terror and fear of their occupiers. 

Read this fast moving story that is excellently written. Form your own opinion...but read it!

EXCERPTS;

First impressions don’t tell the whole story. To get that, you’d have to look across the main road of our village, to the hill on the other side of the valley. There sits the Jewish Israeli settlement of Halamish, a gated community with neatly arranged red-tile-roofed homes, manicured lawns, playgrounds, and a swimming pool. But Halamish wasn’t always there. It was illegally established on our village’s land in 1977. It’s one of hundreds of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in violation of international law. These settlements are essentially Jewish Israeli colonies, and they continue to multiply at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. Over the years, we’ve watched the creeping expansion of Halamish, its settlers confiscating more of our land and resources with the full approval of the state of Israel. Not just approval, but facilitation, too. Israel installed a military base right next to the settlement, to protect its residents and to make our lives in the village a living hell.

In 2002, Israel began constructing a massive separation wall under the pretext of security. Palestinians call it the apartheid wall because it’s meant to separate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from Israel “proper,” but also from occupied East Jerusalem and from the Israeli settlements built inside the West Bank. The wall is several hundred miles long and, in some areas, made of imposing concrete slabs that stand over fifteen feet tall. If that’s not egregious enough, the majority of the wall was not built along Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 boundary, but rather on Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank. This means its path was deliberately planned to swallow up more of our land and cut right through our villages.

Two weeks after my birthday, on February 13, my trial officially began. I entered the courtroom to see, in addition to my relatives, scores of journalists, NGO observers, foreign diplomats, and activists pouring in. But as soon as the judge entered, he ordered everyone but my immediate family out of the courtroom, saying it was for my own benefit, as a minor, that the trial be held behind closed doors. What a joke, I thought. If they cared about my benefit or protection to any degree, why did they ensure that their cameras were rolling on the night of my arrest? Probably to appease an angry Israeli public that felt humiliated by my confrontation with the soldiers and to humiliate me.

If the judge was concerned about what benefited me, surely he should factor in my and my family’s preference. But he didn’t, instead insisting that the trial remain closed, most likely because a public trial meant more negative press for Israel.

A trial carried out in the dark guaranteed that the world would not continue to see how my rights, like the rights of so many other Palestinian children, were being infringed upon.

My personal message to you all is that we must tie our societal struggle to our national struggle for liberation. We must boycott, isolate, and pursue Israel as a war criminal.

Whatever their agenda was had totally backfired on them. They had embarrassed their country, not thinking that the whole world would turn against them and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They had tried to make an example out of me, but really, they had only exposed their country as the brutal human rights violator it so unabashedly is.

If educating the world about our nation’s struggle was my mission in this life, I vowed to carry it out as honorably and as effectively as possible.

Crimes at the hands of the Nazis, and all of humanity should stand against such murderous hatred and make sure it’s never repeated. But how does that give Zionists the right to push us off our own land to make a country for Jews alone? Why should Palestinians compensate—lose our homeland, our property, our rights, even our lives—for the Holocaust committed by Europeans? We shouldn’t have to pay for the crimes of the Europeans against Jews. That’s just wrong.

We need to find a way to live here in one country, with everyone as equals, not in this apartheid state where Palestinians are forced to live on shrinking pieces of our homeland while the best land is reserved for one group. The world did not accept this in South Africa. Why would they accept it in Palestine?

Jewish settler named Jacob Fauci was captured on camera telling a young Palestinian woman named Muna El-Kurd, who was standing in her own backyard, “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.” The video of Fauci, who spoke perfect English with a Long Island accent, went viral. His brazen sense of entitlement to steal a home he knew belonged to a Palestinian family highlighted the decades-long struggle residents of Sheikh Jarrah and other Jerusalem neighborhoods were facing just to remain in their own homes.

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Impermanence; Life and Loss on Superior's South Shore by Sue Leaf - Book Review Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS 

Impermanence; Life and Loss on Superior's South Shore by Sue Leaf

Thought provoking platitudes of a place I knew all too well. It is where I grew up, bicycled, canoed, sailed, beach-combed, camped and eked out meager living while becoming acquainted with and friends of the locals.

Sue Leaf took me on a beautifully described trip down memory lane. I loved it!

EXCERPTS:

There was a bank across the street with a digital clock flashing the time (11:27) and the temperature (58 degrees), and a bit of advice: “You can’t—take it—with you—but try—going—somewhere—without it—SAVE!” I wondered if there was a deeper message in this slogan.

She now talks in terms of the “embodied energy” of old buildings. This is a broad concept that incorporates the cost entailed to construct them and also the money spent to produce their materials—like quarried stone or cut timber—and, too, the incalculable value of virgin wood, so much finer-grained and sturdier than today’s plantation-grown trees.

Sue seemed to be the catalyst that galvanized the town into rethinking its relationship to its past and perhaps to standing up a little straighter.

This is a reflection of an older man, one who has the depth of experience to put such a profound loss into perspective. It comes from someone who has struggled against the dominant current of conventional society, someone who values something that most people do not. I think about this as I trudge along a ski trail in new snow, often a solitary pursuit and now a pursuit made lonely by this unnerving thought: the age of cross-country skiing is drawing to a close.

“there are weeks in the summer when these great bodies of water sleep like placid woodland ponds.” But this can change within minutes. Squalls with high winds launch themselves with fury. Waves pile high, with shorter troughs than in the ocean, so recovery is difficult. At the end of the season, ice accumulates on boats, on decks and rigging. Rescuing any crew in trouble requires stamina, skill, and courage. And that was why the keeper drew from a pool of local sailors well versed in Superior’s capricious moods.

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The Traitor's Wife by Sarah Steele

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Traitor's Wife by Sarah Steele

A fast moving novel of Italy under fascist Germany's brutal invasion during WWII, and some painful fallout that was years in the making. As the story pulled together it became worthy of a five-star rating.

EXCERPTS:

Luisa’s father was a quiet but ardent anti-Fascist. He believed in strong women – he’d married one, after all. Luisa was clever at a time when women were expected to be housewives and mothers.’ Rosa let out a long breath. ‘Life under Mussolini was difficult for women.

Citizens held themselves a little straighter and prouder when they recalled the Four Days of Naples: the people’s insurrection had proved to the world that the Nazis could be defeated.

‘We had lived under the Fascists for twenty years before war broke out. They were terrible, dangerous times, especially for women, and people were angry. Women were angry.’

‘I heard what happened to that woman in the street yesterday – shot down in front of her child. Franco said you were there?’ Luisa nodded. ‘I’ll never forget the sound of that child’s screaming.’

You think the Germans are bad? Stalin is a whole lot worse.’ ‘Have you seen what the Germans are doing out there, or are you too busy making deals with them?’

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Our Year - 2023

 

Our Year - 2023

First the fun things:

Alix and Basil paid us a visit in January and released us from our pandemic exile. They tested negative for Covid before we met for our first breakfast out since March of 2020. We had a wonderful time with them.

Jane’s cousin Lyle and his wife Diane took a cruise ship from Galveston, Texas, to the Port of Progreso. We took a Didi taxi to Progreso and met them for several hours of talking and eating. Jane felt honored by the visit.

 

In May we spent a month in Playa del Carmen visiting with Grisel and her husband Juan...always fun. Grisel has a big place in our hearts. We wish she lived closer to us.

Breakfast out is our favorite activity. We had many with Rosario May and her kids. We celebrated all our birthdays at a breakfast.

For the Record:

In 2023 a striking difference from other years was climate change, record heat, an increase in pollution, and flaming red sunsets at our home in tropical Mérida, Yucatan Mexico, 21º North Latitude. Mérida is city of nearly two million with far too may motor vehicles plus mega power plants straining at their limits.

Twenty-seven percent of Yucatan’s agricultural land has been lost to ever expanding growth.

Fifty years ago when we first arrived in Yucatan, Mérida's population was 175,000 with three gasoline stations, and bicycling was a lark. We had blue sky above and thousands of bright stars at night. Wellwater was safe to drink. Half the housing in Yucatan was made of 100% recyclable materials sourced from the forests. These palm frond thatched homes have vanished replaced by Tio-Sam cement block houses not environmentally friendly making brown outs irritating. The finite potable water supply is dangerously low. Droughts have devastating impacts making wild fires deadly and dangerous. There are just too many toilets to flush! Even with these problems the city is expanding at a roaring rate with no end in sight.

I had read the books by John L. Stephan's of his Yucatan exploration of 1842. In the appendix of volume 1, pages 264 to 271, the morning, noon, and evening temperatures were recorded in an airy shaded place for a year and a half. Those temperatures never exceeded 89ºF. Temperatures we encountered in 1980s Mérida were the same as 1842.

During the last five years climate change significantly accelerated. We had eight consecutive months of record setting temperatures above 100º F or 38ºC every day. Mérida went from a scorching oven to a blazing hell: A preview of coming attractions.

Note: listen to the audio book; Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Valliant to see where our environment is headed.

To avoid the hot season last May, we went to the Caribbean Coast for a month.

On our return to Mérida we coped with the heat in our ecologically friendly home. With no air conditioning unit we used nature to our advantage.

We continue to do our daily exercise routine that includes bicycling and eating breakfast out weekly. Getting around town and to the beach have become wonderful and affordable using the Didi taxi service. There is no excuse for owning a car in Mérida.

Guarding our health is still extremely imperative. The pandemic plus yearly influenza coupled with mosquito-born infections make peremptory precautions of inoculations, social distancing, and face masks essential for senior citizens, and those with asthma absolute necessity.

For amusement Jane has been giving me bread making lessons...she ingeniously has been baking bread from age 10 with the priceless lessons from her two Swedish grandmothers and her mom...I am not yet at graduate stage of learning the thousands of culinary tricks. The learning curve seems unending...it is fun, creative and educational.

We never run out of fun and interesting things to learn and do. We read a lot of books and also listen to audio books. John reviews the books he reads on his blog.

Wishing for an adventurous and healthy 2024.

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A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles Book Review - Five Stars

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow is an extensive novel covering the years from the end of the czars, and Stalin to Khrushchev. It is filled with witty dialogue and memorable witticism. I found this lengthy tome memorable for its fairy tale lessons woven into its capricious text.

Well done and worth reading.

EXCERPTS: The young man was taken with the whimsical architecture of the churches and the rambunctious tenor of the language. But with a dour expression, the German replied that the only contribution the Russians had made to the West was the invention of vodka. Then, presumably to drive home his point, he emptied his glass. “Come now,” said the Brit. “You can’t be serious.” The German gave his younger neighbor the look of one who had no experience being anything but serious. “I will buy a glass the young man was taken with the whimsical architecture of the churches and the rambunctious tenor of the language. But with a dour expression, the German replied that the only contribution the Russians had made to the West was the invention of vodka. Then, presumably to drive home his point, he emptied his glass.

As long as there have been men on earth, reflected the Count, there have been men in exile. From primitive tribes to the most advanced societies, someone has occasionally been told by his fellow men to pack his bags, cross the border, and never set foot on his native soil again. But perhaps this was to be expected. After all, exile was the punishment that God meted out to Adam in the very first chapter of the human comedy; and that He meted out to Cain a few pages later. Yes, exile was as old as mankind. But the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home.

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Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid - Book Review-Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid

I first read this amazing book for the first time more that 30 years ago. 

Since then I have read and reviewed more than 500 five-star books. I only review books worthy of a five star rating. 

Eric Sevareid is unquestionably a stand alone gifted writer, thinker, and analytical intellectual. Rereading his sensational masterpiece was again an enlightening and rewarding experience worthy of more than five stars.  

EXCERPTS:

I suspect I had a deeper and truer intuition for what would come to the world than I have today. And it seems to me my youthful judgments on the individual movers and shakers have held up well. By no means did I foresee every development; not the quick reemergence of Japan as an economic power; not the rapidity with which the Chinese Communists conquered that immensity of people; not the strange paralysis of Britain which I had implicitly assumed would lead Europe into a new way of life. But my sense of the innate strength of the culture of the individual in its historic basin, the West, seems justified now. Ed Murrow had speculated, as the lights came on again in London, that the British would be critically torn between the Russian way and the Western way, but I could not believe that, even then. It was the Germans at the heart of Europe whom I did not trust. This was partly a matter of the stomach as it was with so many Americans who saw and smelled the horrors, and partly the feeling that there was, indeed, a special knot in their spirit, a simmering self-hatred. For years afterwards I could not visit Germany and feel at ease. But in the spring of 1975 I traveled to Bonn to talk with Willy Brandt, the chancellor who had dropped to his knees before the monument to the slaughtered Jews of Warsaw.

He was the authentic “good German” I had known among the neighbors in my boyhood village. I found a freshness, a guiltlessness, even a rich humor in the new, young generation of Germans. I felt at ease among them. I believed in them, because there is a certain duty to believe, but the tiny remaining doubt will not go away.

We did very much to give Europe another chance, to push Japan and Germany and Italy off in new directions. We have touched a great many other places with economic modernity and their ordinary people are not the worse for this, and many are better. No great power ever tried harder or more generously and it does not matter so much in the long run that much of the effort was for private gain. I had been correct in my wartime guess that our most forceful extensions into the world would be those of military America and business America, not those of the evangelical minded. Military America made the greater blunders because business is flexible enough to take and to give, to advance and retreat. It does not want people’s souls, as do the intellectuals; it does not want their obedience as...

John Kennedy pledged that we, with their cooperation, would lift the load of poverty from Latin America’s people in ten years’ time, yet we have not lifted it from the people of Harlem, New York, nor from the Puerto Ricans, our intimate wards. I have come to agree with George Kennan: “To many this view may seem to smack of cynicism and reaction,” he said. “I cannot share these doubts. Whatever is realistic in concept and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are cannot be illiberal.”

We were not born to be imperialists; we never learned the style, and the time for this is gone. We understand the concept of citizen, not that of subject. There is only one true imperium now, that of the Soviet Union.

I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society; later, I watched at first hand its manifestations in several countries. It occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all the West and Middle West. I was to hear the intelligentsia of eastern America, of England and France, speak often of our Middle West with a certain contempt, with a joke in their minds. They contemned its tightness, its dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. They have much to learn, these gentlemen. For we had, in those severely limited places, an intolerance also of snobbery, of callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other men around. The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.

They had no other standard by which to measure except the past. And what had the past been? It had been sod huts, a diet of potatoes and gruel. It had been the hot winds in summer that shriveled the crops, and the blizzards of winter that killed the cattle, that brought the pneumonia and influenza that killed their women and children, while the stricken men turned the pages of a home medical guide and waited for the doctor who lived twenty miles away. It had been the gnarled men who sweated beside a kerosene lamp to learn the grammar of their new country’s language. It had been the handing on from neighbor to neighbor of a few volumes of the classics, a few eastern newspapers three months old. It had been the one-room schoolhouse in a corner of my grandfather’s homestead, where a “bright” aunt could occasionally be prevailed upon to teach the rudiments to tired boys and girls, who had risen before dawn to lug the slops because the family could not afford a hired man.

They came together in villages and put paint on the boards of their houses. They planted green trees, made a park as best they could. They put their money together and hired for their children teachers who knew a little more. They sent some sons away to come back with the knowledge of medicine and the law. They built hospitals and colleges. The colleges were not Harvard nor Oxford, but they saw that the right books were there. They thought they had done well. Who, in his present comfort and easy knowledge, is now to sneer? They were of the men who built America; they are now of the men who keep America. They are America.

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Loving Scott: A Memoir by Pat Horner, BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Loving Scott: A Memoir by Pat Horner

A biographical memoir and emotional look into a dysfunctional life of recreational drugs, alcohol, and personalities that complicated lives of exceptional people.

My wife and I are life-long friends with the author’s husband David. David and Pat have visited us in Mexico. They are wonderful intelligent people who found each other, and now enjoy an action packed life together.

This beautifully written and informative book is a great opportunity to glimpse into a real life story of love, tragedy, and loss.

EXCERPTS:

Throughout childhood and his careers in the New York drag scene and makeup business, Scott stayed humble and grounded. He connected instantly to people while he wove through the cruel homophobia of society and the bravado and craziness of the fashion world.

Escape lured me, but as I waited for something, anything to alleviate that sick, deep feeling of dark clouds outside the window, I was reminded by the ever-occurring sun that life would go on, and so should I.

Her lecture tour with Gloria Steinem was described by Gloria as “the Thelma and Louise of the seventies.” “I had to speak first because after Flo, I would have been an anticlimax.” Gloria said. While onstage, a disgruntled man asked Flo if she and Steinem were lesbians. “Are you the alternative?” Flo asked. I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s words, “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”

Flo had dabbled in acting and was comfortable onstage. I was not. After her rousing speech against the Vietnam War, sexism, racism, oppression, and political apathy at the University of Minnesota, Flo called me up onstage to sing “We shall Overcome.”

I developed the photographs, the arm chair was empty—only the kids were at each side. It was supposed to be a family portrait but I had pressed the wrong button and the self-timer didn’t work. This photo spoke to me years later, depicting my psychological separation from the kids due to my growing addictions. I had gone missing.

Lucky for me the forgetfulness and feeling out of control assured me of never becoming attached to LSD. I was too confused.

I was in love again and in denial of our dependence on drugs and alcohol.

I was not a Deadhead but simply someone, fueled by drugs, who fell in love with a musician. Or was I falling in love with drugs?

My poor husband. Years later when I asked how it had been for him during the first years after Scott passed, he said, “It was hard going.”

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Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell - Book Review Five Stars

Book Review - Five Stars

Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell

As WWII was ramping up to begin, fascism was spreading across Europe on the wings of the Blitzkrieg with blood thirsty Francisco Franco and his like-minded followers clamoring for despotic dictatorship. There would ultimately be thirteen overrun countries by war’s end and countless millions of slaughtered victims.

As the French writer André Malraux put it, “Fascism has spread its great black wings over Europe.”

How quickly memories fade as history is about to repeat itself only now with much more sophisticated and deadly weaponry.

EXCERPTS:

The late 1930s were a grim time. Not only had Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini established dictatorships in Germany and Italy, but in half a dozen other countries, from Portugal to Lithuania, Hungary to Greece, régimes of the far right had risen to power, some of them, like the Nazis, making dark threats against Jews. Even in England, the British Union of Fascists boasted fifty thousand members; wearing black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts, they paraded through Jewish neighborhoods of London under a flag with a lightning bolt, shouting insults, giving the straight-arm salute, and beating up anyone in their way.

In the first weeks of fighting, the plotters and their troops occupied roughly a third of Spain. The dominant figure among them quickly became a young general, Francisco Franco—ambitious, puritanical, devoutly Catholic, and possessed by a fierce belief that he was destined to save Spain from a deadly conspiracy of Bolsheviks, Freemasons, and Jews.

He spoke of Germany as “a model which we will always keep before us” and kept a photo of Hitler on his desk. “It is necessary to spread terror,” declared another general, Emilio Mola. “We have to create the impression of mastery [by] eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.”

Eliminated they were, with a violence far greater than anything seen when Hitler or Mussolini had first seized power. As Franco’s armies advanced through Spain, it was with a ferocity that Europeans had assumed their right in colonial wars but that had seldom been unleashed in Europe itself since the Inquisition. Trade union leaders and Spanish Republic officials, including forty parliamentary deputies from the governing coalition, were bayoneted or shot on sight.

Most regular army officers had joined Franco, and quickly Hitler and Mussolini began supplying his forces with airplanes, tanks, and other weapons, and, from Italy, whole divisions of infantrymen. Against these forces the Republic mustered a smaller number of loyal officers and soldiers, and, trained hastily or not at all, badly armed militias organized by trade unions or left-wing political parties. Desperately short of rifles, artillery, tanks, and warplanes, it tried to buy these weapons overseas. But Britain, France, and the United States were, in varying degrees, leery of the Republic’s left-leaning government, and all of them were loath to fuel a war that might spread to engulf the continent. They declared that they would not sell arms to either side in Spain and pressured many smaller countries to follow their lead.

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