Why Erick Erickson Thinks Biden Doesn’t Drop Out

This morning there was an email from a friend of many years, Susan, who is a conservative and a Republican. Mother was also a conservative Repub, bless her heart. Because of Mother I have decided to post what Susan left in my inbox.

It should be rather obvious to regular readers that when it comes to politics this writer leans hard left. There is a simple reason for that fact. A Republican is a conservative who does not want change. Unfortunately for them, life is change. One must adapt to change, or die. No matter how hard anyone tries, no one can stop change, so for me it is better to embrace change.

For those of you, which must be the vast majority of those who read this blog, who may wonder why I would post something by a conservative Republican I will inform you that things in our house ‘back in the day’ were contentious. The Vietnam conflict was in full force and the men who had fought in World War II did not question what the US government did because if one is in the military one does not question anything. Being born in 1950 meant I was eligible to be cannon fodder for the military. An older boy who lived directly across the street from our house died when a pallet of supplies being shipped to Vietnam fell upon Tommy Twaites, crushing him like a bug, yet his name will not be found on the Vietnam wall.

The name Jerry Waller can be found on the Vietnam wall, and I know this for a fact because I visited Central City Park in downtown Atlanta when the mobile Vietnam wall was there to see his name. I resided in what was known as the Tri-Cities area, in which three different high schools were located. Each school had one ROTC member who was the highest ranking officer of the school. Each year one of the three was chosen to be the top dog, the Battalion Commander, of the three Tri-Cities schools Jerry Waller was chosen to be that leader. Jerry was killed in ‘Nam by a bullet to the head from a sniper.

What follows emanates from a previous post:

One year a very nice young man who was attending Georgia Tech began working at the Boys Club, one of my ALL TIME favorite places on the planet. One day he was reading a model train magazine and after asking to see it he asked, “Do you have a train?” I told him all about the neighbor, and the small train set received from Santa one year. Although I cannot recall exactly when that occurred I can recall it was in the mid to late 1960s and I had not started driving. He was in the ROTC at Georgia Tech, and after graduating, he was sent to Vietnam, where he was killed. I had grown too old to cry, but after learning of his death, I admit to being unable to stop the tears from flowing. What a WASTE! From that moment on I HATED that so-called Vietnam “conflict,” and any and everyone who supported the “conflict” which, I believe, was the “official” name of that “unofficial” WAR. For the Generals to have that war a POTUS had to be assassinated in broad daylight on the streets of Dallas, Texas. (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2024/04/27/journey-by-train/)

I knew many men who had been in Vietnam, including my first roommate, Gary Whitlock, who died almost two years ago. Gary, who had been outgoing and gregarious, was a completely different person after returning from ‘Nam. Gary’s obit can be found here (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/chess-for-the-children/).

There was a lottery to chose which unfortunate young men would be forced to serve in the Vietnam meat grinder of death. I was fortunate to have my birth date chosen as number 291. The family was gathered around the television watching the “draw of death” as we eligible males called the Vietnam debacle. Mother had tears of joy in her eyes upon hearing my birth date announced. She was the only family member who knew that if my number had come up I would have headed to Canada, as did one classmate.

Gary Southerland was a friend known from Chess. When the Atlanta Chess & Game Center opened Gary was the manager and I was in charge of shipping and receiving. That did not last long because the owner was an idiot, who has now been installed in the Georgia Chess Hall of Fame. Gary stayed, at least for awhile. When IM Boris Kogan died Gary took it upon himself to purchase flowers to be sent from the Atlanta Chess Center. The owner became LIVID and excoriated Gary for spending money without his, the owner’s, approval. The owner talked to Gary like he was dirt, so Gary quit on the spot.

One night Gary wanted to talk, so I mostly listened as he talked about his experience in ‘Nam while we sipped some fine Tennessee bourbon. We, or maybe it would be best to say ‘he’, talked until the sun came up. Later Gary committed suicide by “eating a gun.”

It does not take a rocket scientist to see the world is headed for World War III.

With that fact in mind consider the limited choice We The People have to choose the next POTUS. Both candidates are geriatric oldsters with at least one foot in the grave, one of whom talks with at least one foot in the mouth. What the hell kind of choice is that? How did the United States of America get to a point where a CONVICTED FELON, and overt misogynist (the one who proudly said that he could “grab them by the pussy”) can lead one of the two most prominent political parties? That candidate should be rejected out of hand, but at the moment that fool has about a fifty percent chance of again becoming POTUS. You know Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un are loving life ’bout now, knowing that if the Trumpster wins it will mean the end of Democracy, yet millions of idiots support the not much of a man. Why is that? How did We The People get to this point? To this old Senior with one foot in the grave things have become Kafkaesque. All I can hope is that you much younger people come to your senses, because the current leaders have obviously lost their faculties.

There There

https://w3.ric.edu/obom/Documents/There-There-Reading-Notes.pdf

Some time ago I noticed a headline: Research: Reading for pleasure can strengthen memory in older adults (https://mcb.illinois.edu/news/2023-01-20/research-reading-pleasure-can-strengthen-memory-older-adults) that caused me to sit back and reflect…

After racking my memory cells for the last fiction book read I was unable to recall it until later (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/to-kingdom-come-a-review/). The review displeased the author.

Granted, my taste in reading as I’ve aged has usually been non-fiction. An example would be the stack of recent books, some read, most yet to be read, concerning the JFK assassination. One of the reasons I stopped writing the blog was to have more time to read. Another reason was I thought there was nothing else to be said. Once again, I was wrong.

Later this headline garnered my attention:

Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Sequel Is a Towering Achievement

“Wandering Stars” considers the fallout of colonization and the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

By Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection “If I Survive You,” which was nominated for the 2022 National Book Award and a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize.
Feb. 26, 2024 (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/books/review/tommy-orange-wandering-stars.html)

“Whoa,” I thought, “that’s high praise one does not often see.”

Truth be told, I am the kinda guy who, after reading the magnificent Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse,

simply had to read his entire oeuvre. Therefore I “just had” to read There There prior to reading Wandering Stars. An immediate request was made to my local library, the Decatur branch of the Dekalb County Library System, and a few days later the book, a hardback obviously read by many readers, was checked out and DEVOURED. It would have been read in two sittings but life intervened (don’t you just hate it when that happens?!) and it was finished in three.

Before completion of the book a request was made for Wandering Stars. Prior to heading to the Library I checked to learn if any requested books would be waiting, and was disappointed to see none were ready for my grubby little hands to hold. Drats…

When checking in the books the nice lady behind the counter asked if I would like to check out one of the requested books that had just come out, but had yet to be placed in the “B” section of books awaiting other grubby little hands. She held up Wandering Stars.

“WOULD I!” was my only thought. It turned out to be a paperback with LARGE PRINT and my grubby little hands would be the very first to read the book, my very first LARGE PRINT book. “Life ain’t so bad,” I thought when checking out , while grinning like the cat who ate the canary.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY!

The plan, Stan, is to review There There today and Wandering Stars later, if life does not intervene… I have not read any reviews prior to writing, and look forward to reading, and listening, to the reviews, and especially to listening to the author talk about his book. For those of you who prefer reading, or listening, prior to actually reading the book: (https://w3.ric.edu/obom/Documents/There-There-Reading-Notes.pdf)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsHNaoJbMlg)

There There, by Tommy Orange

The book, There There, hits one like a Mike Tyson left hook to the kidney.

I was completely captivated and riveted while reading and could not put it down.

‘Back in the day’ a female relative married a Native American, Henry Yawn. Half a century ago I worked and traveled with Henry. It was the early 70s and we would work all day, have dinner, and talk prior to Henry going to sleep for the night. I would stay up late studying Chess because I had been hooked, lined, and sinker’d by the game. Much was learned from the man, whom I admired.

Decades later there was a tempestuous relationship with a woman who was a Cherokee Native American, but had been raised by her parents, both Cherokee, to be an American. We resided in what had earlier been the “stomping grounds” of the Cherokee Nation. (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2022/08/21/the-georgia-guidestones/)

The Native Americans saved the first settlers from Europe from starvation. In return the Europeans attempted to eradicate the original Americans. The crazed Union General
William Tecumseh Sherman,

after laying waste to my city, Atlanta, and state, Georgia, went west and perpetuated genocide upon the Native Americans, for which history records him a great man. One can read a plethora of quotes from Sherman, such as my favorite:

“Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.” William Tecumseh Sherman

What else do you need to know about those particular yankmees?

“I intend to make Georgia howl.” William Tecumseh Sherman

“My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
William Tecumseh Sherman

“The more Indians we can kill… the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.” William Tecumseh Sherman

“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children… during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” William Tecumseh Sherman

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” William Tecumseh Sherman

It was not only Southern people Sherman hated:

“…[We] must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering and robbing.”
William Tecumseh Sherman

These quotes have been taken from (https://www.azquotes.com/author/13493-William_Tecumseh_Sherman).

One of the facts concerning the War of Northern Aggression is little known to northern people, and that is the fact that most Native Americans fought with the CONFEDERACY! Think about it…

‘Back in the day’ I had to sit in school listening to teachers telling me to read all about how wonderful it was for the northern heathens to “win the Civil War”, when the fact is that it certainly was not “wonderful” for the Southern people, or the Native Americans who were practically wiped out by the yankmees. Most Southern people were taught to keep the RAGE within, for obvious reasons. I’ve grown too old to “keep it in” any longer. It is no longer RAGE, but OUTRAGE! Now try to imagine how the Native American people feel…

What follows are only some of the things I copied by typing from the book when reading:

Prologue

In the dark time
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

-Bertolt Brecht

pg 29

Dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on “There There” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

pg 57

“Opal Viola, baby girl,” my mom said, and moved some hair behind my ear. She’d never, not once, called me baby girl.

“You have to know what’s going on here,” she said. “You’re old enough to know now, and I’m sorry I haven’t told you before. Opal, you have to know that we should never not tell our stories, and that no one is too young to hear. We’re all here because of a lie. They been lying to us since they came. They’re lying to us now!”

The way she said, “They’re lying to us now” scared me. Like it had two different meanings and I didn’t know what either one was. I asked my mom what the lie was, but she just stared off toward the sun, her whole face became a squint. I didn’t know what to do except to sit there and wait to see what she would say. A cold wind laid into our faces, made us close our eyes to it. With my eyes closed, I asked my mom what we were gonna do. She told me we could only do what we could do, and that the monster that was the machine that was the government had no intention of slowing itself down for a long enough to truly look back to see what happened. To make it right. And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories. And then, as if all of it was leading up to what she was gonna say next, my mom paused a long pause, looked off toward the city, and told me that she had cancer. The whole island disappeared then. Everything. I stood up and walked away without knowing where to. I remembered I left Two Shoes over by those rocks all that time before.

When I got to Two Shoes he was on his side and in bad shape, like something had chewed on him, or like the wind and salt had dimmed him down. I picked him up and looked at his face. I couldn’t see the shine in his eyes anymore. I put him back down like he’d been. Left him like that.

pg 67

I find out that the same neurotransmitter related to happiness and well-being supposedly has to do with your gastrointestinal system. There’s something wrong with my serotonin levels. I read about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants. Would I have to take antidepressants? Or would I have to reuptake them?

pg 82-83

Yes, things look bad these days. Everyone talks like it’s getting better and that just makes it all the worse that it’s still so bad. It’s the same with his own life. Karen tells him to stay positive. But you have to achieve positivity in order to maintain it. He loves her though. All the way. And he tries, he really tries to see it as being okay. It just seems like young people have taken over the place. Even the old people in charge, they’re acting like kids. There’s no more scope, no vision, no depth. We want it now and we want it new. This world is a mean curve ball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand.

pg 136

We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eights, sixteenths, thirty second. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.

pg 152

Octavio walks back to the couch. “Fuck!” he says, and kicks the table. Daniel goes back to mindlessly playing chess on his computer. He suicides a bishop for his opponent’s knight to mess up his formation.

Part III pg 157

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. -James Baldwin