That Good Lookin' Al Spence

Being Memorial Day..., and I have been posting stories that involve my Dad..., I thought it fitting that I post his obituary from last year here.

                                                 Alexander R. Spence, 79, Weippe

                                                            Born: Aug. 23, 1929
                                                            Died: Aug. 07, 2009

The spoken phrase, “Hello, I'm That Good Lookin' Al Spence,” will be spoken never again by the man who coined and used it throughout most of his life. Al has passed on to be with his beloved wife Wanda in the hereafter. The one and only time he ever referred to himself as something other than “young and good lookin' “ was when he described himself as “…an old, homely, older-than-dirt husband… “ when he wrote Wanda's obituary in November 2006. It was a true measure of the depth of the loss he felt.

Al was born in Ellensburg, Wash., to Alexander Spence and Ethel Vanderkar Spence, both deceased. The family, including sisters Ethel Pollillo of Kennewick and Mary Ann Chapman of Weippe, and half-sisters Ione Jones Layman, deceased, and Elna Jones Marner, deceased, moved to Weippe shortly thereafter and Al spent most of his life there.

While still in his teenage years, Al took a job horse packing for Steve Russell at the Lochsa Lodge near the Idaho-Montana border and Lolo Pass. The experience was one of his fondest memories and he reminisced about them on a recent road trip to that location with his two sons, Scott R. of Forks, Wash., and Larry of Weippe.

Al was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served in California and Germany. Before being deployed overseas, he married Wanda Kautz, on July 7, 1951, in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Their marriage lasted a life-time and Al was at her bedside when she passed away.

When he returned to Weippe he worked for Potlatch as a cat skinner, and participated in the Clearwater Log Drive featured in the July 1951 issue of the National Geographic magazine. In the later 1950s, he bought his own dozer and became a contract logger. He continued to build his logging operation until the call of the north took him to Alaska and the pipeline project in the 1970s. When he returned to Weippe he sold the logging operation, bought a small ranch, and became the cowboy he always wanted to be. He ran his cattle-raising operation until an auto accident in the early 1990s. The injuries slowed him down physically and he could not continue the practice.

Al leaves three grandchildren, Keith Spence of Lewiston, A.J. Spence of Lewiston and Bert Spence of Weippe; two adopted grandchildren, Brianne Page of Sandpoint, Idaho, and Stacy Petty of Fort Hood, Texas; and three great-grandchildren.

Al will be cremated and no services are planned. Surviving family members ask only that he be always remembered as, “That Good Lookin' Al Spence”.

Biscuits & Gravy and the First Killing Frost

Encouraged by the comments from Ellen on my last post..., and of course by Don signing on as a follower..., I am posting this one from last fall. It was originally posted to my Diary on The Agonist (10/12/09). Hope Ellen (and Don) can smell the Biscuits & Gravey this time :)


There are few things in life better than biscuits & gravy on a frosty morning. Especially when it brings to mind fond memories of your recently departed father dishing it up inside a wood stove warmed tent in a hunting camp on Cook Mountain in Idaho many years ago. Yeah…, a little breakfast before the work begins. The fun is over but the thrill isn’t gone until we have saddled the horses and mules and headed back down the draw to pack the downed elk out.

But this morning…, it’s Julie providing the biscuits & gravy here on The Ranch on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. Throw a couple of fresh eggs, provided by the chickens that roam The Ranch, fried to perfection on top, and you feel like you can take on any challenge. The game to harvest later today after this first killing frost isn’t elk though. I haven’t killed any game animal for meat since I left Idaho over twenty years ago. And I hope that I never have too. But will…, if I must. It’s been a few years since the elk have raised havoc with our fences…, but they aren’t far away. The horses and dogs attest to that. The Garden is closer though, and I feel confident that I won’t get the ambiguous feeling from pulling potatoes out of the ground that I did from putting an elk on it. We will see today how successful we have been at coaxing food from this ground we call home. A back up plan to put food on the table in never a bad strategy. In the days to come it may be a necessity to meet the challenges ahead.

I don’t see any back up plan for our nation. We are running on stimulus. We were served up a breakfast of dried biscuits in the form of a busted economic strategy to pull forward demand for housing and credit. Some say we couldn’t have chocked down those biscuits without an outlandish helping of gravy in the form of monetary stimulus. We will never know for sure now. But given the fact that the gravy wasn’t used for it’s initially stated purpose…, and has been spread over the plate to include things like enticing people to buy new cars that they don’t need…, I can’t help but doubt the wisdom of the plan. With real unemployment running around 20% and no real turn around anywhere in sight for the foreseeable future…, we are told we can count on a jobless recovery. The gravy hasn’t helped us choke down those biscuits either. What are we going to do when the gravy runs out?

I am going out to The Garden…, and think about better days and my father.

Ray Holes Saddles

It was early fall in the low country…, but on top of Cook Mountain it was late fall. Water was freezing in the bucket at night and the heavy morning frosts looked more like snow in the meadows around our hunting camp. Inside the tent on those mornings you knew everyone else was awake, staying in their warm sleeping bags…, because the snoring had stopped…, waiting for some other brave fool to crawl out and get a fire going in the stove. The Western Larch trees that we call Tamarack, the only evergreen that changes color and loses it’s needles in the winter, were aglow with that rich golden color that deciduous trees aspire to…, but never attain.

We had packed in, on horses and mules, about five miles from our base camp on Weitis Creek a few days before. My butt told me it was much further than that and I was still more than a little saddle sore…, when my Uncle Leroy decided that it was safe to turn his bell mare loose. He figured that his horses and mules would hang around as long as Beer Nip was tied in camp. Beer Nip wasn’t a mare, but served as the bell mare for my Dad’s herd. Dad was already throwing his saddle on Beer Nip as I watched quizzically…, and my uncle shouted something like, “Oh shit,” as eight head of horses and mules headed across the meadow at a trot. They were headed the shortest route to the road that circled around to our spike camp. As Dad put the bridle on Beer Nip and handed the reins to me, he said something like, “Well…, if you can’t head them off before they reach the road…, they will probably stop at our base camp on the Weitis. If that happens…, you just as well spend the night there, load up some more grub and come back in the morning.”

That frost I mentioned earlier was long gone by that afternoon…, but the moisture it left on that dirt road made walking on that road a treacherous ordeal. Galloping a horse down that road was something else altogether. But my butt told me that it was worth the risk of avoiding a much longer ride. They say that some funny things can go through your mind when you have a near-death experience. Well…, my life may not have been passing before my eyes…, but mud and snot and sweat and slobber sure were. And I was thinking..., “Damn…, this is one fine saddle.”

The heavy brush along the road had more to do with turning back our quitters than any heroics on my part. But back at camp I remarked to my Dad that I kind of liked that saddle of his. He remarked, “That’s a Ray Holes saddle, boy.”

I didn’t even know what brand of saddle I had. I did know that I wished my Dad was riding it, with it’s padded “sissy seat”, and I was riding his hard seat Ray Holes when we headed off Cook Mountain that fall. I got half that wish the next day when it was decided that we would save a little gas in the stock truck by roading the herd up out of the Weitis. I got to ride Beer Nip and the Ray Holes saddle and lead my uncle’s bell mare…, while the rest of the head was turned loose. Dad and LeRoy took the vehicles about five miles up to the top of the ridge where we would load them up for the trip home. Beer Nip and Tillie didn’t much like the fact that the rest of the herd would gallop away up the road and out of sight, then turn around and gallop back to check that the alpha horses were still coming along. The fact that Tillie’s colt was one of the herd made her another type of pain in the butt for me to deal with. I had to keep a tight rein on Beer Nip to keep him from galloping away to catch the herd. I thought I was in for a miserable, bone-jarring trot that even a Ray Holes saddle couldn’t mitigate. I wasn’t so wrong about that…, but Beer Nip was a pacer. If it hadn‘t been for having to deal with a distraught mother in fear of losing her only child…, it would have been like riding a rocking chair. I now understand why Jake Spoon rode a pacer in “Lonesome Dove.” But he couldn’t have been riding a Ray Holes saddle. I bet he would have…, if they were made back then. He understood quality and comfort.

I never forgot about that Ray Holes saddle. Many years later when Julie and I had our own “ranch” here on the Quillayute Prairie and a couple of our own horses, she needed a saddle of her own. I searched Ebay…, and found a Ray Holes saddle…, with a $2500 reserve! I didn’t bid. I did call my Dad. He laughed at my astonishment at the price of a Ray Holes saddle.

So…, that’s the story of how my “saddle obsession” started. The George Lawrence saddles we have now…, that far outnumber our horses…, aren’t the quality of a Ray Holes…, but they are beautiful, well made…, and more in our price range.

In that 1945 issue of “Western Horseman” magazine I mentioned in my last post about George Lawrence saddles…, there is an ad for Ray Holes Saddle Co. It says simply:

Honest fellows

We’re swamped. No delivery less
than 8 months. Please order only
if a necessity.

Says a whole lot about the quality and character of Ray Holes and the demand for the saddles he built.

From Lee M. Rice’s book, “They Saddled the West”:

Ray Holes was living with the single ambition to become a full-fledged saddle maker with a shop of his own. At the same time, he was not blind to his lack of fundamental knowledge in the craft. He knew from experience that some saddles were good while others were bad: that many well-built and good looking rigs were uncomfortable to ride. Some were hard on a horse’s back and some would wear out a man in a day’s riding, despite their apparent quality. Occasionally he would come across some old hull, out of date and badly worn, that possessed a welcome comfort evidently bestowed by a superior craftsman who understood the secrets of overall perfection. Each day brought new questions for which Ray had no definite answers. The more he observed, the stronger grew his conviction that the most comfortable and best fitting rigs for all-around hard work on the range had been built by earlier saddle makers who had risen to prominence during the decades shortly before and immediately after the turn of the century, when the stringent demands of cowmen were at their height. Further study convinced him that the more important old-time saddlers were growing scarcer every year. If he were to benefit by their knowledge, it behooved him to undergo some first-hand studies at the feet of the old masters before rapidly advancing years took their final toll.

He therefore, set out to contact all the old-time saddle makers he could find who might initiate him into the basic principles of the craft. Some he was able to reach through correspondence; some he visited in person; others he worked with as a willing apprentice for varying periods of time. As might be expected, he met occasional rebuffs or cynical brush-offs. Not all men were willing to share their secrets with a stranger. Yet here were enough, who recognized in the eager young man a reflection of their own quest for knowledge, that he found himself led, step by step, into the inner circle of master craftsmen.

…

Armed with the best available knowledge, advice and practices gleaned from a wide variety of preeminent saddlers about the country, Ray’s main ambition was to produce something outstanding in saddles for the working cowboys, First in importance, he reasoned, was to set up the three basic qualities as his standard: mainly, comfort, durability and beauty. On this foundation it would be necessary to build a saddle that could meet all the requirements of the arduous range work that Idaho’s steep and rugged mountain country demanded. It was a big order. Yet his years of cow work and roaming the uninhabited wilderness, which had enabled Chief Joseph’s people to elude the United States Army in 1877, gave way an understanding of the special needs in riding equipment for such rough territory.

…

Along with these accomplishments, he developed a type of free-swinging stirrup leathers that avoided the bundlesome and awkward features of some patented stirrup leather hangers. In a mountainous country, where so much up- and downhill riding is necessary, these free-swinging stirrup leathers win praise from all who use them. They are only equaled by the Ray Holes carefully constructed saddle seats. As a matter of fact, the two items are actually combined to give the maximum in comfort. It requires extremely artful care to shape and place the parts that eventually combine themselves into a single unit of all-around durability, comfort and beauty, such as captured Ray Holes’ vision 40 years ago.

Rice’s book was published in 1975. Ray Holes started building saddles in the 1930’s, and though he has passed away, the tradition of fine saddle making is being carried on to this day at the Ray Holes Saddle Shop in Grangeville, ID.


Pictures added 5/30/10



The saddle that I rode in the story has disappeared. It was an older, pretty much plain with a "high-back" cantle if memory serves me correctly. Dad never would have sold the saddle..., my brother and I figure that he "loaned" it out before he passed away. Almost a year after he passed away now..., and no one has showed up to return the saddle. This one pictured above was numbered "1076" and it features some of the carving that Ray became renowned for. Ray began to number his saddles and records were kept of each order sometime in the 1940's. A Ray Holes saddle that I picked up on Ebay is numbered "1785" and was ordered by Coy Solander of Weston, Colorado on 10/28/55. It is a "rough-out" model and is pictured below.



Picture below is another Ray Holes that my Dad had. It was stamped "Caroline" on the back of the cantle. If I remember right..., it was an un-numbered saddle.



In David R. Stoecklein's beautiful book of photo's of "Saddles of the West" there is a picture of three saddles. The caption reads, SADDLES MADE BY THREE OF THE BEST SADDLE MAKERS OF THE 20th CENTURY - Lawrence, Hyser, and Ray Holes, Stoecklein Collection. (it should be Heiser I am sure). In the back of the book he says, "Ray Holes was born in 1911 in central Washington. He opened his first saddle shop in Cottonwood, Idaho in 1936. Soon after he moved near Grangeville, where his shop is still located today. Ray's son Jerry grew up in the shop and is now a master craftsman of the trade. They startd making their own saddle trees in 1955. Ray also invented tools for carving leather that are still used today. Ray, himself a master carver, considers Jerry's work to be even better than his own."

I don't have pictures of the one Ray Holes I have from Dad's collection yet. It is an older "high-back" (without carving)..., it is stamped "Cottonwood" as opposed to "Grangeville"..., obviously one of his earliest saddles. I have no idea how many "Cottonwoods" there are out there. Not many I think.

George Lawrence Saddles

I am not a serious collector of anything..., but I have managed to "accumulate" a few old saddles made by the George Lawrence Company of Portland, OR. This is my latest addition.


From "They Saddled the West" by Lee M. Rice:

The George Lawrence Company of Portland, Oregon, has the distinction of being the oldest established firm in the Northwest engaged in the manufacture of Westen riding equipment. Some firms--including Main and Winchester and the L.D. Stone Company of San Francisco--were established prior to the founding of the George Lawrence Company, but the others are no longer in business.

The Lawrence Company was founded in Portland in 1857, at the end of the romantic Oregon Trail days. It was startd by Mr. Samuel Shylock, who came west to the Oregon country to establish himself in his trade of saddler and harnessmaker. In the new city of Portland, he found the opportunity he had been seeking. There was a great need for a shop to furnish harness and riding equipment to outfit settlers and army posts in the remote sections of the Northwest.

...

Mr. Shylock was joined by his brother-in-law, George Lawrence, in 1874. Two years later, upon the death of Mr. Shylock, George Lawrence took over the management of the company. The firm was reorganized in 1893, being incorporated as the George Lawrence Company, and under that masthead it has remained ever since.

...

The George Lawrence Company has never gone into extensive manufacture of high-priced custom-made goods. Their policy and reputation was built by concentrating on quality, catering to the cowpuncher, the packer, and the man who must spend many hours a day in the saddle. To win the cooperation of such men as these, they must provide a saddle that will stand up under the most severe tests with the greatest comfort to both horse and rider. A hundred years of satisfied customers is substantial evidence of the Lawrence Company's record of dependability.

A shorter version of this book excerpt was published in The Western Horseman magazine in Jan-Feb 1945. The George Lawrence Company quit making saddles sometime in the 1950's. I believe that the saddle pictured is one of the last they made in the 50's era.

The Coming Storm

It's been a rainy and windy weekend here. It reminded me of this submission to The Agonist on 11/16/10. I was fearful that a disasterous Christmas shopping season would spell the end of the government efforts to "save the economy". As it turns out..., I was as wrong about that as the weather predicters were about their storm warning.


The Coming Storm

Here on the Quillayute Prairie the rain is coming down…, sideways. We have a steady 12 mph SE wind with gusts up to 27 according to the National Weather Service report…, with worse to come.

A STRONG FRONTAL SYSTEM WILL SLOWLY PUSH THROUGH THE COASTAL WATERS LATE SUNDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY THEN PUSH ONSHORE LATE MONDAY EVENING. WINDS ALOFT AHEAD OF THIS FRONT ARE EXPECTED TO BE STRONG AND THIS WILL INCREASE THE SURFACE WINDS...ESPECIALLY OVER THE COASTAL WATERS AND ALONG THE BEACHES. THERE IS ALSO A CHANCE THAT A DEEP LOW PRESSURE CENTER WILL FORM AND BOOST THE COASTAL WINDS LATER MONDAY. SOUTH WINDS OF 50 MPH WITH LOCAL GUSTS TO 80 MPH ARE POSSIBLE LATE SUNDAY NIGHT THROUGH MONDAY EVENING.

PERIODS OF HEAVY RAIN OVER THE OLYMPIC MOUNTAINS AND NORTH CASCADES COULD DRIVE RIVERS IN THOSE AREAS ABOVE FLOOD STAGE BY MONDAY OR MONDAY NIGHT.

RAINFALL WILL GRADUALLY INCREASE OVER THE OLYMPICS AND NORTH CASCADES TODAY THROUGH MONDAY EVENING...WITH PERIODS OF EXCEPTIONALLY HEAVY RAIN POSSIBLE OVER THE OLYMPICS MONDAY.

I take solace in the fact that weather men are far from reliable prophets…, especially government prophets. Well…, all I can say is…, if the forecast is correct the ducks will be swimming up to the front porch for dinner. The little pond is already backing up toward the barnyard…, but we are in no danger of any real damage causing flood. The ducks love it…, the dogs and horses…, not so much. I may not love it as much as the ducks…, but there is nothing like a good storm to clean out the cobwebs and get some juices flowing…, if you are ready for it. Julie made coffee last night in case the power was out this morning and we stored up extra water in the bath tub to flush the toilet with. Our water supply is underground in the well and with no power we have no way to get to it with a bucket. Yeah…, if you prepare for the worst it is never as bad as predicted. But when you are unprepared…, it can be damned inconvenient…, or worse The temperature is in the mid-forties so in spite of the fact we have electric heat…, we won’t freeze. If it gets too cold in the house…, we can always go to The Bar. The timber frame shed out back that we call The Bar, is equipped with a propane stove with a reasonably authentic looking fireplace view…, without the other hassles involved with the real thing. Once you have flipped a switch to start a fire you may just swear off ever splitting another arm load of kindling. And if the stove doesn’t provide enough light we can always pump up the old Coleman gas lantern and listen to it’s soft, comforting hiss…, along with the battery powered radio. The thought of it almost makes you wish the power would go out. We really should invest in a gas generator for such “emergencies”. But I fear that Julie would just want to hook it to the TV in the house instead of using it to power the 35 year old Heathkit 1515 stereo receiver in The Bar. I am still the romantic and she is ever so practical.

But…, it isn’t this Storm that I am worried about. It’s The Storm to Come. I have written here previously about a “Crash”. One year seven weeks ago on 9/25/08 I wrote, “The Crash is Coming…, with or without this Bail Out. The Bail Out is just that…, a Bail Out of the fat cat investors that run this country. It will accomplish one thing and one thing only. It will “buy” them time to reposition their portfolios and make money from this coming crash.” Well…, the Bail Out came, the S&P crashed to the 600 level. Do I need to tell you what happened after that? Record bonus for the fat cat investors this year and extended unemployment benefits for us. Not long after the Bail Outs…, the Stimulus started. Seven weeks ago I wrote in “Living on Stimulus” that, “… prior experience tells me that more of the same crap that got us here isn’t going to keep the party going. We have way to far to go for a quick rush to solve the problem. We aren’t going somewhere slowly…, we are going nowhere fast.” Well…, the extension…, and expanding…, of the $8000 mortgage credit is an attempt to keep that first rush alive. Our government is buying up houses so fast for people who have little…, if any…, hope of ever paying them off, that the FHA is already broke. Fannie and Freddy have been broke for a long time. As Denninger is fond of saying, “This is sixth grade math.” And it not just won’t work…, it can’t work. Somewhere along the line I made a comment and referred to a “Cold November Rain” coming in terms of our financial outlook. I meant that late in November we will get a pretty good picture of what the retail outlook is for the Christmas shopping season. I think it is going to drown a lot of “green shoots”. I don’t see consumers coming out of their cocoons. Many of the State budgets cuts of last summer are just now working their way through the system in terms of actual layoffs. Over 250 layoffs were announced in my agency just last week…, and the anxiety I see on the faces around me is frightening. We had been warned that this Storm was coming…, and are being warned that the Storm will likely continue for the foreseeable future. You just can’t prepare yourself for that kind of Storm.

I don’t think I am any better prophet than a government weather man.., but I have some common sense. Yeah…, I am ready for today and tomorrow’s natural Coming Storm. The other financial Coming Storm I see ahead…, not so much.

Scott R. November 15, 2009 - 3:23pm

Khoel

Julie..., Butch Ukura..., Me...,
and Khoel

Yesterday I was talking to a young fellow, and he remarked that he had grown up in the neighborhood where we had lived prior to acquiring The Ranch. He didn't remember me..., but he sure remembered my Great Dane dog, Khoel.

I remember him too..., and miss him. Almost a year ago, Don Henry Ford Jr. ("The Urepentant Cowboy") whose Blog I follow (link at my profile) wrote this piece for The Agonist

http://agonist.org/don/20090410/work_and_more_work

In it he described having to put down an injured foal.

"The week was rough. Wednesday morning Manuel called from Seguin and tells me that one of my mares had a foal but the foal isn't getting up. I arrive to discover that she has stepped on his front leg and broken the coffin bone. Not just cracked it--it's completely broken in two. The foal tries to get up and falls, again and again--the leg dangles like a limp rag. He looks at me and nickers.

I have no gun.

But I have a pair of fencing pliers...

I spent the rest of the day thinking I deserve to be dead.

Today marks the day we killed Jesus. Again.

Lord have mercy. I don't know about the rest of you but I'm going to need it."


I worte this piece about Khoel for him. It's almost as hard to read as it was to write.


I Thought I Was Tough...,

I wasn’t going to pay a vet $75 to take care of something that I could do for pennies. I felt it was my responsibility. We had raise Khoel from a pup.

A big, coal black Great Dane who struck fear in the hearts of the car deck hands on the Alaska Ferry System when they walked by the canopied Toyota pickup. They couldn’t believe we were going to let him out on a leash during the car deck call. He was fine with people when he wasn’t guarding his truck. And I have never seen a smirk dissolve on the face of a man as fast as the Rottweiler owner when the Rot “got away from him” and charged straight for Khoel. I gave just enough slack in my leash to let Khoel swat the Rot off balance with his front paw and pin the Rot to the deck with his jaws clamped to back of the Rot’s neck. Khoel had more than just heart…, he had the physical prowess to back it up.

But those days were long gone and his hips had given out. His back end was lifeless and he couldn’t get up at all or even stand with help. So I managed to wrestle him into the back of his pickup once more and we drove from town out to what is now The Ranch…, but was then just The Property. I dug the hole. Then we drove out to the ocean beach at La Push and looked out with him where he used to be able to stretch out more like a Greyhound than a Great Dane and run like the wind. We bought him a chicken dinner and drove him back to The Property.

I regretted most that he would never be there to guard The Ranch like he guarded his pickup…, at least not above ground. Then I put a 9mm slug in the back of his head. He stiffened out and didn’t move. I threw the gun on the seat of his pickup and took a couple of deep breaths. I took off his thin, decorative silver choke chain and put it around my neck. I gave him a pat on the chest to say good-by…, and his heart hadn’t stopped beating yet.

I’m not so tough.

Mercy granted Don…, mercy granted.

Scott R. April 11, 2009 - 12:24pm

Joe Bageant

I have added Joe Bageant to the Blogs I am following. I must admit that the first few essays of Joe Bageant’s that I read, I was a bit taken aback. As in, “Lighten up a bit on the working poor Joe.” But I am reading his book, “Deer Hunting With Jesus - Dispatches From America‘s Class War” now…, and I have a much clearer understanding of where he is coming from. I encourage everyone to read it.... and his website.

Joe Bageant

You may be a bit disconcerted by the title of the book…, I was too. Joe explains it this way in the chapter, “Valley of the Gun”.

“To nonhunters, the image conjured by the title of this book might seem absurd, rather like a NUKE THE WHALES bumper sticker. But the tile also captures something that moves me about the people I grew up with--the intersection between hunting and religion in their lives. The link between protestant fundamentalism and deer hunting goes back to colonial times, when the restless Presbyterian Scots, along with English and German Protestant reformers, pushed across America, developing the unique hunting and farming-based frontier cultures that sustained them over most of America’s history. Two hundred years later, they have settled down, but they have not quit hunting and they have not quit praying.”

The morning after the 2004 presidential elections I called in sick. I felt the least little bit guilty about that…, but I just could not understand how George Evil Bush managed to win re-election after what he had done to America in the four previous years. How could it happen? Joe’s book provides the answers I was looking for…, and it still makes me sick.


From the chapter, "Republicans By Default".

“That is the American hologram. That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique. And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads. Working people do not deny reality. They created it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction. Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That’s what they voted for--an armed and moral republic. And that’s what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.”

From the chapter titled, “American Serfs”.

“Admittedly, a real blue-collar middle class still exists in some places, just as unions still exist. But both are on the ropes like some old pug boxer taking the facial cuts and popping eye capillaries with no referee to come in and stop the carnage. The American bootstrap myth is merely another strap that makes the working poor privately conclude that they must in some way be inferior, given that they cannot seem to apply that myth to their own lives. Hell, Pootie, if immigrants can put together successful businesses of their own, why can’t you keep up with your truck payments? Right now, even by the government’s spruced-up numbers, one-third of working Americans make less than $9 an hour. A decade from now, five of the ten fastest-growing jobs will be menial, dead-end jokes on the next generation--mainly retail-clerks, cashiers and janitors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

And here are ten more quotes from "Deer Hunting With Jesus"

The Archdruid Report

"Hillsfar" commented on one of my comments over at Ian Welch's Blog last weekend. He (she?) suggested that I check out the

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

I did..., and now I am a follower of that blog.

Here is a sample from a piece called "Endgame".

It’s crucial to realize, though, that this move comes at the end of a long historical trajectory. From the early days of the industrial revolution into the early 1970s, the United States possessed the immense economic advantage of sizable reserves of whatever the cutting-edge energy source happened to be. During what Lewis Mumford called the eotechnic era, when waterwheels were the prime mover for industry and canals were the core transportation technology, the United States prospered because it had an abundance of mill sites and internal waterways. During Mumford’s paleotechnic era, when coal and railways replaced water and canal boats, the United States once again found itself blessed with huge coal reserves, and the arrival of the neotechnic era, when petroleum and highways became the new foundation of power, the United States found that nature had supplied it with so much oil that in 1950, it produced more petroleum than all other countries combined.

That trajectory came to an abrupt end in the 1970s, when nuclear power – expected by nearly everyone to be the next step in the sequence – turned out to be hopelessly uneconomical, and renewables proved unable to take up the slack. The neotechnic age, in effect, turned out to have no successor. Since then, for most of the last thirty years, the United States has been trying to stave off the inevitable – the sharp downward readjustment of our national standard of living and international importance following the peak and decline of our petroleum production and the depletion of most of the other natural resources that once undergirded American economic and political power. We’ve tried accelerating drawdown of natural resources; we’ve tried abandoning our national infrastructure, our industries, and our agricultural hinterlands; we’ve tried building ever more baroque systems of financial gimmickry to prop up our decaying economy with wealth from overseas; over the last decade and a half, we’ve resorted to systematically inflating speculative bubbles – and now, with our backs to the wall, we’re printing money as though there’s no tomorrow.

My take is that our politicians are trying to fix a problem that can't be fixed..., by throwing money at it. The vast majority of that money is being siphoned off by the Banksters and other financial elites (and politicians). We need to do some deficit spending to keep the social safety nets like unemployment functioning. That money gets to the people who need it. Trying to "create" temporary jobs for them stimulates the economy in the short run..., but it won't do much to fix the underlying problem that we have been trying to solve by those very means for the last 30 years. We have used deficit spending to put off dealing with this crisis, hoping that "growth" would pull us through for far too long. I agree with John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report..., I think we have reached an "Endgame".

Growing Old With Jackson Browne

I posted this on on The Agonist back in July '09.

Stayed up late last Saturday night to catch Jackson Browne on PBS’s Soundstage program. Yeah…, I am getting to the age where anything past ten o’clock qualifies as a late nighter. It wasn’t just that, that was making me feel old. When I calculated it, I realized that it must be 25 years since I last saw Jackson Browne in concert. That was in Boise, Idaho…, a six or seven hour drive from where I called home at the time. I had an old partner who had just done a little time in Boise at one of Idaho’s finest facilites…, and a Jackson Browne concert was a damn good excuse to get down there to see how my old friend was doing. It was the last time I saw Jackson Browne…, or that old friend. I moved on…, the old partner went back. I tracked Jackson’s career moves much closer than I did that old buddy’s after that.

The first time I saw Jackson Browne in concert , about ten years prior to that Boise reunion concert…, was in Norfolk, Virginia. 1973. Courtesy, so to speak, of my “friends and neighbors” who selected me to serve my country. I can also thank the U.S. Army for choosing my assignment at Ft. Eustis instead of Vietnam. Jackson wasn’t the headliner in those days, he was the opening act for Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I didn’t even know who Jackson Browne was before that concert…, but I never forgot. That’s not to say that I appreciated just what a special talent as a singer-songwriter he was at that time. I packed a lot more years of living…, and almost dying…, into those ten years between Jackson Browne concerts than the time line would suggest. During one of the convalescent periods of a particularly close call…, I spent time reading “From Here To Eternity” and listening to “The Pretender”. If you are well acquainted with one or the other…, imagine experiencing them simultaneously.

“The Pretender" was an old album by that time. “Running on Empty” was out…, and I had about worn it out. So I pulled out the “The Pretender”.

“Though the years give way to uncertainty
And the fear of living for nothing strangles the will
There’s a part of me
it speaks to the heart of me
Though sometimes it’s hard to see
it’s never far from me
Alive in eternity
That nothing can kill.”
“The Fuse”

“No sooner had I hit the streets
When I met the fools that a young fool meets
All in search of truth and bound for glory
And listening to our own heart beats
We stood around the drum
Though it’s fainter now
The older I become
Living your life day after day
Soon all your plans and changes
Either fail or fade away
Leaving so much still left to say.”
“Daddy’s Tune”

“I’m going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And we’ll fill in the missing colors
In each others paint by number dreams”
“The Pretender”

It took a few more years…, but I found that girl…, and she is still filling in those colors. Brighter every single day. When we were living in a cracker box camper trailer in a remote logging camp in Southeast Alaska, we bought “Lives in the Balance” on cassette tape. And I discovered that Jackson Browne had even more range that I ever imagined.

“I’ve been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you’ve seen it before
When a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war
And there’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars fought in the places
Where their business interests run”
“Lives in the Balance”

That was a good 10..., closer to 15 years…, back down the road now. So I was anxious and excited to hear what Jackson had to say last Saturday. Jackson doesn’t get much air play on FM radio…, unfortunately…, and I never made the conversion to CD’s when the vinyl records turned to warpped crap in the 80‘s. It took me three tries to get a playable copy of “Running on Empty”. I got lucky with “Hold Out”…, but threw up my hands in frustration with “Lawyers in Love”. So I have missed a lot of Jackson Brown since then. Yeah…, I’m getting old. And so is Jackson Browne. I was happy to see that he hasn’t dyed his hair. No pretender he. He still looks good. I wish I could say that he still sounds good. But nearly 30 years of chain saw screams and heavy equipment bellers have taken their toll. That’s why I don’t listen to new music today. I can’t hear it. It’s a jumble of words that I can’t filter. I need a magnifying glass to read the lyrics on a CD. The old music is still there though…, inside the ear. I can still hear it load and clear. So, I don’t know what new perspectives Jackson had to impart last Saturday night…, but when he closed the show with a song released in 1986..., “Lives in the Balance”…, I realized that his music and his message are ageless and timeless.

“There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can’t even say the names
They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everything from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight and to die”
“Lives in the Balance”

Scott R. July 18, 2009 - 3:30pm

Comments on "Health Care Reform"

Last week I posted this comment on The Agonist:

I am on record here (and elsewhere) predicting that a bill would get passed…, and that the only sure thing about it would be mandatory “insurance” coverage. I thought for a brief moment that I would have to admit that I was wrong…, it was barely on life-support. But it didn’t take the insurance companies long to swing into action…, raising rates. Now…, if they really didn’t want any bill passed they would have laid in the weeds waiting until it was completely dead…, but they didn’t…, they rose up and virtually shouted out load, “You need to pass some kind of bill NOW…, or look what’s going to continue to happen!” And The Big O stood right up with them (coincidence?)…, calling a summit…, promising “bipartisan” (compromise?) support for a new health “care” reform bill.

What we need is a health “insurance” reform bill…, not a health “care” reform bill.
The Big O is going to deliver for the insurance companies (mandatory insurance coverage & no competition)…, and the insurance companies are going to keep the premium increases…, and there won’t be much (if any) insurance reform in it.

I agree…, there is still “hope” that he will take a stand and deliver something meaningful…, or let it die…, but I am not holding my breath.

Scott R. February 28, 2010 - 11:02am


Last night on PBS, Bill Moyers asked as much of one of his guests.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03052010/transcript5.html

BILL MOYERS: Excuse my growing cynicism at this age and stage, but could this be the briar patch strategy? In other words, they want to get people angry enough to– for Congress to pass that health care reform with the mandate that delivers millions of new customers to them under penalty of law?

The guest, Wendell Potter didn’t answer that question directly, but he believes that the bill should be passed because there are enough good things in it (at least the Senate version) to offset the “mandated coverage” requirement. Things like requiring the insurance companies to cover “pre-existing conditions”. My question is, will they be required to cover people with “existing conditions”…, and what’s the difference? He says there are meaningful regulations…, I say those will be eliminated or watered down in the bill that gets passed. And I say again…, a bill will get passed.

The next guest, Marcia Angell takes the position that there isn’t enough good in the bill, even if it isn’t watered down, to make it worth passing. And she echoes what I said above.

MARCIA ANGELL: It’s not lack of health insurance. It’s lack of health care. There is a difference between health insurance and health care. You can have insurance offered that is too expensive to buy or too expensive to use. What good does it do? And what happens when this occurs, is that what you see is instead of improvements, look at my state of Massachusetts.

So if you look at what’s causing the problem, the causes are not being targeted in this plan. They’re not being addressed. Maybe some of the symptoms of the causes are being addressed like let’s stop excluding people from pre-existing conditions. But it doesn’t stop the insurance industry from raising its premiums.…And what do you think they’re going to do? If you were an insurance company, you would say, “Well, thank you, Santa Claus. I’ve got all of these captive customers. Young ones are healthy. They probably won’t even use the insurance. There’s nothing to stop me from raising my premiums. I have all of these subsidies coming in.” Don’t you think that the prices would go up? I think it would be remarkable if they didn’t.

When I look at the Senate bill and the President’s suggestions, almost every paragraph, there is a poison pill for someone. I think sometimes they’re unintended. Let me give you one example. They allow for insurance companies to charge three times as much for older people as for younger people.

So from the point of view of the insurance industry, this is a god-send because either way, they win. Either the 55-year-olds cough up three times the premiums, and that’s good. Or else they can’t, and that’s probably the more likely situation. They can’t, and then they’re fined. And the insurance companies don’t have to take care of people who might actually get sick. They’re left with all of the thirty-year-olds, who are less likely to get sick, but who are required to buy their products.

So this sets up a situation which probably all plans, for 55-year-olds, are high priced. So they can’t afford to buy it, or if they do buy it, they have to pay an excise tax on it. This is a real poison pill for these older people. It’s a gift for the insurance industry.

Well worth the read…, or the watch.