Eight Feet Deep

How people do business these days simply amazes me.

You have large hospital corporations that purport to be steeped in religion — after all, they have “St.” in their name — who either treat you like a can of tainted ham or else they are so incompetent they don’t know what companies are subcontracting their business. Of course, hospitals use so many subs that it’s kind of understandable. You have the ER doctor company, the radiology company, the company that gives you shots, the specialists, the anesthesiologists, the podiatrists and, of course, the proctologists in case some patient just finally has enough and he launches a size 12 Red Wing up somebody’s anal cavity. “Look ma, no cavities!”

Then you have the telecoms. Satan has either developed a special place in Hell for them or else they are Satan. Not being religious in a traditional sense, I’m not sure.

Also, there is a close line between medicine today and the telecom industry. That would be the fact that both have some workers that are not trained in English nearly as proficiently as those who hire them believe. Please, you know me. I’m don’t have an ethnocentric bone in my body. Well maybe my ulna has something against Canary Islander but I’ve been trying to work that out.

When I hear good ol’ Americans complain about people whom they can’t understand because of their language background, I don’t completely tune them out. When you have a  job in which communication can be a matter of life and death, you would like for them to be somewhere on the same page. If you don’t like people speaking a language you don’t understand because you think they are making fun of you — they probably are — you are just paranoid.

I’ve heard good ol’ boys who need a translator as well. Thank goodness dispensing fishing bait doesn’t require critical language skills. And, I know this will stir up people, but the DEA is looking for translators who speak Ebonics. No s**t.  I think that is crazy.

The headlines today — parroting all punditocracy — give varying grades to the speech given last evening by President Barack Obama on the end of combat in Iraq and the economy. I thought it was probably one of his best speeches since he was elected. Then I turned on CNN to see how bad everyone thought it was. Yes, CNN and not Fox. I mean, why Fox? I knew what they were going to say.

A so-called “end to combat in Iraq” evokes some very deep feelings inside me. For one thing, I saw a little of that war in the making perhaps up closer than I would have been had I not been a reporter working near former President Gee Dubya Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. That is not to say I would go for spins in the propane-powered pickup truck Bush drove to prove he was a “real Texan.” But I heard a few of the more important words he spoke on Iraq while listening to him in person, or a foot or two away while I was trying to stay upright in a journalistic herd. I say a few important words, not by any means all.

But I witnessed in person a little piece of American history and it was one of the most disgraceful eras in my lifetime. I would say even more so than all the shenanigans with Vietnam by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and their merry band. The great difference was I was not a child as I was during Vietnam, and one who was truly scared shitless by so much of what I was seeing and experiencing. The Sixties were scary, no doubt. What the war did and did to the millions involved is just too vast to comprehend. Regardless of those pulling the strings, thankfully we had people who served and continue to serve our nation with so much valor and honor.

There was no valid, lawful reason — despite what the U.S. managed to finagle out of the United Nations — for our nation to invade Iraq. I  predicted an end as we’re seeing. I don’t even know if we are really seeing the end. That, even more so than the economic problems, are square on the back of G.W. Bush. Oh, he gave the nation a ventilation mechanism for 9/11 to pile on top of Afghanistan. But the U.S. still looks as if it has no good options upon leaving Iraq completely.

Conservatives are programmed to say, on many occasions, that the “left-wing, liberal” press continue to favor their darling president. But it’s funny because I don’t see it that way. Many who can look at both the left and right wings and tell them apart see something very different. Maybe a lot of the national media lean left. And really, I speak of the punditry class here. Those who are more left than Obama don’t like that the president has been unable to make gay marriage a right throughout the land or in the military, or that his administration has not implemented more “green.”  A lot more than just the left doesn’t like our involvement in Afghanistan at all.

And George W. Bush? He was battered and beaten to a pulp by the mean ol’ liberal press wasn’t he?

Let’s think about that. Bush, probably more president than any in history had the chance along with his vice president and some top aides to be playing harmonicas in a federal prison after both an illegal invasion and for spying upon American citizens. But the mainstream American media just kind of whistled past the graveyard while the Bush gang was digging up bones.

A large majority of Americans, supposedly, are against the Islamic center being built near Ground Zero. Many are really fed up with Obama and the Democrats. Meanwhile, the opposition offers nothing but anger, and retribution and investigations and if they can find a trumped-up charge with which to impeach Obama, just as they did with Clinton before him, you can bet they will. The Republicans in Congress and some of their supporters are a perpetually pissed-off tribe. I’m angry too, but at least I take medication for it.

This post rambles, somewhat, and intentionally so. That is because it is hard to be consistently coherent when you see so much of the World you love crumble around you like the leavings in a box of oatmeal cookies. There really isn’t much to do about it. Well there is, but that would take effort. And, you know, we’re all to busy to make the World a better, safer and saner place, aren’t we?

Pardon us, please, as we are suffering from a bad case of HSDL-LSUL. That is to say, high-speed download, low-speed upload. In other words, my Internet speed is running slower than a snail pulling a 50-pound barbell uphill.

This affliction started gradually and has hit full-tilt over the last week. It is difficult to send e-mails, much less photos or upload a You Tube short-short.

Unfortunately, cures for computer woes are hardly 100 percent unless you decide to chunk yours out a four-story window. After the expected fighting with my computer company, Dell, and my wireless broadband provider, Verizon, I am making scant progress. I will be receiving, hopefully, a replacement USB modem tomorrow from Verizon. It will be my, what, fifth in two years? I haven’t even had the chance to get to the wireless problem with Dell because of a keyboard problem that they will only repair if I ship my laptop in or if they send me the parts and I replace the keyboard myself. Neither will happen.

If the USB doesn’t fix it, I suppose the next step is reinstalling Windows 7, which I really don’t want to do. After all, I received the computer with the system already installed. I just hope sometime soon my broadband is back to some sense of normalcy so I can enjoy it until something else goes wrong with my computer, broadband or both. Hey, I’m a glass is half-full kind of guy. I’m optimistic that within six months I will have another problem to deal with in my never-ending war with technology.

Old soldiers never die. At least the ones in the comic strips don’t.

It wasn’t all that unusual to find 60-year-old guys in the Army at the precipice of the Iraq War with America in a simultaneous fight in Afghanistan. Times were hard and as former Defense Secretary and chief Bush administrator wisenheimer Don Rumsfeld once famously told a soldier: “You go to war with the army you have … ”

Even so, the fact that the comic strip “Beetle Bailey” turns 60 this weekend you would be looking at a 78-80-year-old private if his true age was laid bare. And Sgt. 1st Class Orville Snorkle, probably 100 and Gen. Halftrack, why he’d be might be in the “World’s Oldest Man” category.

Bailey was introduced as an indolent college student named “Spider” when he enlisted in 1951 and he not only remained in the Army but did so continually as a private whose main purpose in life is laziness when he isn’t getting his ass kicked by Sarge. The latter, one  must say, doesn’t do bad at near 100.

Of course, comic strip characters never age — although perhaps some have — and most never die. What is even more remarkable is the fact that the characters many times live on longer than their creator. It’s a rather neat trick when you think about it.

The strip, “Beetle Bailey,” itself slowly kept up with the times. Although the civilian secretary Miss Buxley to this day remains a sex object, she has neatly tread the waters between remaining a beauty and having a firm hold on her inner “hear me roar-ness.”

Then the turmoil from the Civil Rights struggle which found itself alive with riots and fires on board Navy aircraft carriers during the waning days of the Vietnam Era was reflected with a somewhat PC afro-coiffed lieutenant named Flap. He was later followed by an Asian Cpl. Yo and eventually Spec. Gizmo, a token “geek” whose arrival came as part of a contest sponsored by Dell Computers, the money raised going toward the Fisher House Foundation. That organization provides housing for relatives of veterans and military personnel in hospitals.

The U.S. military remains the nation’s societal microcosm and “Beetle Bailey” — for all its warts and flaws — has long been a mirror held up to the armed forces. It is because of those warts and flaws, and the fact that it is one of those fun house mirrors being hoisted, that “Beetle” has remained a great American treasure.

Sure Beetle is lazy. If you go out with your buddies drinking and chasing skirts every night for 60 years, you’d be searching for a napping space yourself. Sarge would probably have Beetle and his pals polishing rocks or vacuuming the parking lot around Camp Swampy if they weren’t all out trying to hide from the sometime ridiculously mindless jobs the military expects performed by its non-  “bullet catchers,” as a Army reserve officer I know recently called those in combat. When you get down to it, Beetle represents those service members who are more tired than lazy. Although one who proudly was named “Laziest” in his high school, I know when someone is genuinely lazy and Beetle is one lazy soldier.

Much of the real military isn’t portrayed in “Beetle” and who would want it? We get enough death and dying and the young men and women you see minus limbs or who await their PTSD “group” at the VA. Sure humor could come from all that — gallows humor — but much of society doesn’t understand that type of funny although those who do generally use or have used it for a coping mechanism.

Great comic strips show a part of our world that many of us have trouble expressing. “Beetle Bailey” makes everything so simple. So I wish Beetle a happy birthday and many more. Oh, and have a good nap.

It seems like every weekend here in Southeast Texas you will find people staging some kind of benefit for some struggling soul. It may be barbecue for sale, or a fish fry or a dance held at a local VFW, K of C or honky tonk. I guess we are no different from anywhere else, but people down here certainly have good hearts when someone is in dire straits.

So many benefits are there that one just pretty much has to pick the one which most tugs at your heart strings. If I were going to a happening this weekend to help out a fellow Southeast Texan, it would be the benefit being held in downtown Beaumont at Crockett Street for a man whose music has brought me unmeasurable pleasure — Jerry LaCroix.

I’m sure people in some parts of the World and the U.S. of A. and even Southeast Texas have never heard of this man. Some down this way might even say: “Just another coonass.” Well, while LaCroix may have the Cajun blood of a true “coonass” he is far from “just another anything.” At one time this singer, song writer and extremely talented musician, dynamite sax player, fronted two legendary bands of the late 60s and 70s, Rare Earth and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Those older Boomers from the  crossroads of Texas and Louisiana remember LaCroix by another name: “Jerry ‘Count’ Jackson,” who was one of the tornado-like forces behind the group that married swamp pop and blue-eyed soul. That band was the Boogie Kings.

I grew up listening to the music of the Boogie Kings as well. That is because my older brothers as later did I, had to drive across the Sabine River into Louisiana to pursue a little entertainment accompanied by an adult beverage. Some or perhaps all of my older brothers at one time or the other might have heard the Boogie Kings. When the laws changed to where 18-year-olds could buy liquor in Texas — that changed again some 10 years later — I was still at the Texas Pelican in Vinton, La., watching the magic  revolving bandstand take one group off for a set while another band came on. One of the bands I heard there a couple of times was fronted by Jerry LaCroix, no longer Jerry Count Jackson or a Boogie King. He was then lead singer of White Trash.

The band was originally Edgar Winter’s White Trash. Beaumont native Edgar Winter, whose brother Johnny was “making the big-time” as Edgar sang on their debut album, teamed up with LaCroix for some truly amazing fusion of rock, R & B, and just plain down home Texas-Louisiana soul. Their live album “Roadwork,” included Johnny’s guitarist Ric Derringer doing Chuck Berry proud on the Chuckster’s “Back in the U.S.A.”

I saw Jerry at several Boogie King revival gigs in later years. His long hair and beard turned white exemplified the newest model of a rocker and blues guy who never sat too long to change into anything permanently but himself. Once I even interviewed Jerry for a local newspaper prior to a show featuring the old Boogie Kings, including Jerry Count Jackson’s soulful singing partner G.G. Shinn.

Journalists aren’t supposed to get all comfortable and chummy with their subjects. But a bunch of us were sitting around having a few cold ones about a decade or so ago at the 9-hole Port Groves Golf Course clubhouse in Jerry’s hometown of Groves, Texas, while Jerry held court. He has lived a lot in however many years he’s been around now, with most of those years being a musician who has played in the smallest of tonks to huge concert halls both in the U.S. and abroad.

Jerry LaCroix was never a big star. But he has managed to live his life making music and making people, like myself, happy while doing it. People who are stars in our eyes, like Jerry, normally don’t have a good insurance plan unless its working out of one of the union halls. Regardless, Jerry now has some health problems — congestive heart failure — which is not the same as a heart attack but still can be a very serious and debilitating disorder.

Thus, the reason why a bunch of folks are getting together to play music and serve some gumbo and barbecue. Local blue-eyed soul and swamp pop legends T.K. Hulen, Charles Mann, Jivin’ Gene along with G.G. Shinn will be playing at the former Scout Bar and Antone’s on Crockett Street. The money raised will go toward helping the the expenses and medical bills Jerry has incurred. I’m sure there is a way to donate if you can’t make it to Beaumont, Texas on Sunday afternoon. Don Ball is listed as a contact for more information about the benefit (409) 548-4444. Jerry’s official Web site also lists his e-mail as well as snail mail addresses.

Were Gov. Goodhair Rick Perry to do the limbo — an absurdity certainly because his hair would get tripped up in de limbo stick — he certainly would have a good answer to the limbo question: How low can you go? If you are Rick Perry, you can go pretty damned low.

Perry has employed the iconic law enforcement agency, the Texas Rangers, to fight a somewhat dubious war on the border with alleged drug cartels. The specifics are few, “operational security,” says the state’s public safety director, according to a very illuminating Associated Press story. Plus, the Rangers don’t want to brag. What the hell is this? Andy Griffith? No, I imagine good ol’ Andy would be more forthcoming than the Texas Department of Public Safety, under the political control during the political silly season of the silliest goober of them all, Rick Perry.

The Rangers are a part of the DPS. They are seasoned officers who served in various duties ranging from the highway patrol to intelligence to narcotics. I have encountered the DPS in many situations over the years. These encounters were as a fellow public servant, as a reporter, as a bystander and yes, as a traffic offender. I can say that all-in-all, the Texas Department of Public Safety troopers I have known have with a few exceptions been the most professional law enforcement officers I have ever known or ever hope to know. Yes, there are some bad eggs. But I’ve seen many more good ones.

As for open government, the majority of state troopers I knew would tell you as a reporter, right there on the scene of an accident, what he knew from whether an accident victim had life-threatening injuries to which car’s driver “over-corrected” before striking the oncoming automobile. That is not to mention, which the trooper would, whether the victim wore a seat belt or if alcohol was suspected.

That is why I am so very disappointed at the state’s DPS director allowing Perry to, once again, use the department’s personnel to make Goodhair into an even bigger cartoon doofus than he actually is. The Capitol Police and governor’s security detail are also DPS. The whole “Rick shooting a coyote” deal is just total bulls**t. The DPS director, former FBI official Steve McCraw, to his credit did spend several years in his early career as a Texas State Trooper. Maybe he will come to his senses and remember those days, back when the welfare of Texans was more important than serving the political jackass who hired him.

Okay, I give up. Sometimes you keep hearing these names until they start visiting you in your dreams. Thank goodness this hasn’t yet been the case for me. So that is why I finally decided to Google: the Kardashians.

I’ve heard of Kim Kardashian. I seem to remember hearing about a sex tape, that she was on some TV show (“Dancing With the Stars”) other than the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and that she dated then broke up with then dated and broke up with Reggie Bush, the New Orleans Saints star, who won the Heisman Trophy and then had to give it up because of a “pay-for-play scandal” when he attended USC. Whew!

Now it seems Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathalon winner, is part of the Kardashian klan having married Kris, the family matriarch.

Still, I don’t know what makes this whole family give America a big buzz. I mean Kim Kardashian, who is also a model, is kind of … hot. Well, maybe even more than one of the family is … hot. But come on. There are a lot of attractive people in the world and some of them are smart, some are as dumb as a box of rocks.

So back to where we were. I don’t get it. But, I have never watched their little TV show, starring the Kardashian family.

Oh well, at least I can nod my head in honesty when someone now asks “you know those Kardashian family people?” I could just as easily had lied.

Those who seek undertaking an act of kindness need not go farther than the local supermarket.

Twice this afternoon did I stop to perform a good deed for two different elderly women who were disabled. A two-fer, if you will. I did it first and foremost because I was asked to do so. At least, in the first instance I was asked to in some degree and in the latter I was more or less ordered.

A silver-haired lady in a motorized shopping cart accosted me in the bread section and asked if I would help her find a loaf of sourdough. I scanned the breads and finally landed one brand. Of course, this was not what the woman wanted. She already had this kind and wanted another kind. However, after looking some more, she accepted the loaf and thanked me.

Feeling all good about this encounter, I got in my pickup to drive off and I saw another sliver-haired damsel. This one was standing beside her car, its hood opened and jumper cables were dangling from her hand. This elder had a “disabled” tag on her mirror although she was not parked in the disabled area. And the lady was pointing toward her battery, indicating that’s where her battery was located, and indicative of the notion that I would pull up to jump her car.

Following the elder lady’s orders I helped get her car running — an elderly gentleman had come to where we were to give us benefit of his expertise — and left.

These two encounters got me thinking about karma. And when I say “karma” I mean it in a more simplistic American sense which is somewhere between that of the Buddha’s “I declare, O Bhikkus, that volition is Karma. Having willed one acts by body, speech and thought.” And the Biblical: “ … whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7)

Many Americans who are not familiar with Eastern religion tend to have the “TV version” of karma in mind. That would be a take that is not quite as thought out as in the irreverent comedy “My Name Is Earl.” It is more simplistic like the long ago song title by Southern rockers Wet Willie: “Everything That ‘Cha Do (Will Come Back to You.) Personally, I like the simple version just fine. The key word is “simple,” as in “KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!)”

While I continue to see some spiritual value — still not totally figured out in my mind — in the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of karma, I also like the one-for-one concept. You do a good deed. A good deed is done for you. Inherent problems exist by the goatfuls with this concept, of course. First, I have no idea how many good deeds have been perpetrated on my behalf in the past. I, likewise, don’t really know how many benevolent episodes I have done in my lifetime other than the two this afternoon. And what about the cause and effect? If I wake up tomorrow and found out someone left me $10 million with no explanation why, what good deed was done that led to this good fortune? Or perhaps the moolah was left for me for no specific act of kindness.

See the problem?

It’s like someone told once way back in the 70s when we were doing something or the other: “Karma is a heavy thing, dude.”

Yes, heavy it is. If you like doing good things and/or you think they are the right things to do, perhaps you should just keep doing them and leave the counting to accountants. Counting Karma is just too darned complicated.

Most folks probably don’t think a lot about insect stings until it happens to them or someone else. I’m the same way. I steer clear of them and most the time we get along swimmingly. Sometimes we don’t.

My niece, Mel, alerted us last night via Facebook that she had visited the ER for an allergic reaction to some kind of sting. Only a short time before that I was struck by a hornet. I think it happened putting on a pair of shorts. It fell out of my shorts, anyway. I immediately smashed that stinging f**k in a kind of primeval reaction.  I suppose  it was more of a reaction from its attack on me than anything. It hurt, a bit. Mel said she knew of five other people who had been stung that day. Of course, this wasn’t all in one place, maybe at most a 60-mile radius.

If you take time to read this, I didn’t, you might find out why late summer is a prime time for being stung by stinging thingers. I think it has to do with the sex life of insects, which, I am just not into. You know, “He’s Just Not That Much Into Your Sex Life If You Are a Hornet.”

Mel has to carry an epi pen now in case of an allergic reaction. I kind of worry about allergic freak outs. I’ve never had one but I’ve had allergies, and I have had unknown allergies that made my upper lip swell, twice in fact. The first thing I did after getting stung, other than crushing that poor little hornet and loosing a couple of new expletives I’ve not heard, was to take a couple of Benadryl. I am not recommending it unless your doctor says it’s okay, but it’s a great antihistamine in case of a serious allergic reaction. And if you have such a reaction, call an ambulance ASAP no matter what.

I also did the ice thing. Ice for awhile. No ice for awhile. My upper thigh is still somewhat reddened, itching and the point of impact is still sitting there looking like mutated fire ant sting. Having a bit of the Type II diabetes. Oh, yeah, I forgot my little toe doesn’t look good at all, Anyway, just so you know, there are all kinds of stinging  critters out there and I have been stung, bit, chomped on and everything except hit upside the head with a .22 like I mentioned my friend Tere did to an alligator once.

Speaking of gators, many Southeast Texans are no doubt  rejoicing that the popular (locally at least) “Gator 9-1-1″ will return to TV. It is based here in Beaumont, Texas, and features folks who own a local gator preserve and cafe (for the gators who don’t mind their Ps and Qs.) Seriously, from what I can see on the show and have read about Gator Country, those folks do a good job of catching nuisance gators — and there are a few around here. The Gator Country people also appear to do a great job educating the public on gators and their place in the World out there, even if they cook the gators, hey, sounds okay to me!

I don’t know how I got from hornets to gators but I did. I wish a happy weekend to all and to all, a good wasp-eating alligator!

The racism and xenophobia of the right is just getting a little hard for me to stomach. The Pew poll (here is the whole dang thing, read it, every word of it!) suggesting 1-in-5 Americans believe President Obama is Muslim makes me mad when I suppose it should just make me sad. It’s sad to know that people are willing to believe big lies enough if they are constantly bombarded by an adept public relations machine. Too bad the poll didn’t seek a direct correlation between those who think Obama is Muslim and from what source does information such as Obama’s alleged religion come? Can anyone say: “Fox News” or perhaps “Glenn Beck.” Holy hocakes folks! You are getting a scam run on you and you don’t realize it. Cut off that Fox News or Rush Limbacon for awhile and read a damn book. Listen to soothing music. You are getting brainwashed.