Irony at Appomattox

A while back, I posed the question, which two American Presidents were once POWs. Only one person got the answer: George Washington, who was briefly a prisoner of the French at Fort Dusquene (near modern Pittsburgh), and Andrew Jackson, who as a young boy, was a prisoner of the British during the War for Independence. A British officer told Jackson to shine his boots; Jackson indignantly refused. The officer struck Jackson across the face with his sabre; Jackson carried the scar for the rest of his life. And he did *not* shine those boots.

Anyone who was paying attention during history class knows that General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox to end the Civil War in April 1865. OK, which family owned slaves. Oh, irony, irony, irony! Robert E. Lee's father-in-la was a very wealthy man who owned a great many slaves, who by the provisions of his will (he died in 1858) ere to be manumitted in 5 years. So, ironically enough, Lee's slaves were freed on New Year's Day 1863- the same day the Emancipation Proclamation was due to take effect. (If not for the will's provisions, they would have had to have waited until the Union Army got to them.)

General Grant's in-laws owned many slaves in Missouri, who did not gain their freedom until the end of 1865. The General's wife owned one slave as a maid- so at the time of Appomattox, the Confederacy's General, a non-slave owner, surrendered to the Union General whose wife still owned a slave.

During my research, I came across one other interesting bit of trivia: in the late 1850s, through his in-laws Ulysses Grant owned one slave, a man named William Jones. At that point in his life, the Grants were in *extremely* bad shape financially; selling jones would have brought in some *badly* needed cash. Grant simply set Jones free.Kent

OJ Simpson

One

Jock

Sent

Into

Mean

Prison

Sentence

Overjoys

Nation

Of course, OJ being sent away for the rest of his life ruins his plan to get married again. Yep, he was going to take another stab at it. And I'm sure his family will miss him at Thanksgiving. He won't be there to carve up de white meat.

Chatting with Ms. Leg

Way back in December, 1975, I went shopping with my then-gal pal, Donna Larimer. (I have made plenty of mistakes in my life; refraining from marrying her was not one of them) We stopped by one store's jewelry counter, and I noticed that the woman behind the counter happened to be an extraordinarily tall lady. I'm slightly under 6'3', and this gal was way taller than I was, maybe 6'6' or something like that. Anyhow, as Donna walked around the jewelry counter (probably looking for the wedding band she wanted me to get for her), she came to the spot where sales people would step through to get behind the counter, looked down, did a doubletake, and gasped, 'You're not standing on top of anything!' No, indeed she wasn't.

I think I said something nice like, gee, it must be nice to be universally admired, I mean, just about everybody looks up to you, ma'am. (I did get her to smile) Anyhow, the three of us had a nice chat for a few minutes. And then Donna and I shopped and shopped and shopped and shopped, and finally Donna says, 'Gee, what do we do now?' And I said, 'Well, we could go back and chat with Ms. Leg' For about the next minute, I caught hell. As in WHO did I think I was, and WHY did I have to act like such a jerk, and HOW could I be so insensitive, and WHAT was I thinking of, and WHERE do I get off saying something like that, and WHEN was I going to get some manners...et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When Donna stopped long enough for me to get a word in edgewises, I said, 'Donna, did happen to notice that that lady was wearing a nametag?' 'No' 'Well, she was. And guess what her nametag said?' Yep, it was Ms. Leg. (Actually I think it was with two 'G's.)

Obnoxious Coworkers II (Rated R)

A PS regarding Liz Pederson:

What color to you have to be, to become a Christian Scientist? Any color at all. So if I say (as I quite emphatically do) that Christian Science is rubbish (I once dated a Christian Scientist who, upon finding a lump on her breast, she would read 'Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures' until it went away. I disagreed. Very strenuously. I prevailed. It was benign. We broke up. Years later she managed to get some idiot to marry her. They had a kid. Kid got a high fever. She read SHWKTS until the kid was brain damaged.) Does saying that CS is rubbish make me a racist? Hell, no!

What color do you have to be a Mormon? Any color at all. (In 1978, the head of LDS church had a Divine Revalation that blacks could be full members of the Church.) If I say that the Book of Mormon completely fails the giggle test (I've read it cover to cover- all the Mormons I've ever met are decent people, but how they take that book seriously is completely beyond me), does that mean I'm a racist? No, it doesn't.

What color do you have to be to become Catholic? Any color at all. If I say that for ten centuries Catholics have bred themselves for stupidity and that The Church will not live down the conduct of pedophile priests in Bush Alaska (and elsewhere) in this century or in the next, or that the failure of Pius XII to show even a shred of physical courage in the face of the Nazis makes me doubt that ANYONE in Christendom takes seriously the idea of Eternal Life, and that Henry VIII had the EXACTLY the right idea about how to tax Church property- does that make me a racist? No, it doesn't.

What color do you have to be to become a muslim? Any color at all. If I can that muslim suicide bombers apparent ability to seriously believe in an Eternal Afterlife means I find them a HUNDRED times scarier than Catholic, and woebetide EVERY country in Western Europe if they don't take drastic action on immigration REAL SOON (i.e., Forceable Repatriation) cuz the most common name for newborn baby boys in Belgium and in Britian is now MUHAMMED- does that make me a racist? No, it doesn't.

However, when I made the points listed in the paragraph above, guess what LP called me. Since she is gay, I shall always regret that I did not say, look, Liz, that is both very insulting and very false. So don't call me a racist, and *I* won't call you a *cocksucker*.

Kent

Obnoxious Coworkers

A friend of mine with a primarily blue-state outlook, has told me that her red-state coworkers sometimes annoy her immensely, partly because of their inability to ever acknowledge the possibility that anyone could possibly hold an opposing point of view. V., I totally feel your pain. With colors reversed, that is exactly the situation I went through for five years in Bethel. For example, I can understand that people find Texas' record on capital punishment in general, and George W. Bush's actions while Governor deeply troubling...especially the case of Karla Fay Tucker. (Every bit as horrific as Bill Clinton's treatment of Rickey Ray Rector).

Incidentally, if you believe that as a born-again Christian Karla Fay Tucker was destined to spend eternity in Heaven after death (I quite emphatically do NOT), wasn't W. doing her a huge favor by approving her execution? I mean, really, where would you rather spend 30 years or so- Heaven or a Texas prison? OK, in six years as Governor, W. signed off on 152 executions...that's 25 a year. Texas' population is a bit over 20 million. OK, so George W. Bush's Texas was hell on earth. So, what would you call a place with a per capita rate of executions ten or twenty or a hundred times higher? Pop quiz: who was it who said, 'All that we need to execute a man is to show that it is necessary to execute him. It is that simple.'? Hint: it was not George W. Bush. Well, actually, it was 'Che' Guevera. In 1960, Cuba had a population of about 6.5 million. In 1963, after 4 years of communist rule, the Cuban government announced that they executed 2,875 people after trial, and 4,245 without trial. By my math, the a Cuban had more than a hundred times better chance of being executed by Castro's government than a Texan had of being executed by George W. Bush's.

If you're wondering why I bothered doing those calculations, it's because a coworker in Bethel, my one-time boss, John Cashion, had a poster from a coffeeshop on his wall- that contained an exerpt from Castro's eulogy for Che Guevara. Hmmm...why didn't he have one of Lawrencia Beria too?

Next story: back in '04, we got a new attorney named Liz Pederson, who happens to be gay (that's neither here nor there). First day, a group of us have lunch. The subject of Iraq comes up. Things rapidly get heated. Using my amazing powers of diplomacy, I think, I know what I'll do- I'll change the subject. Let's talk about dogs instead. I'd just read an article about American soldiers adopting Iraqi dogs (since Arabs regard dogs as 'unclean', some of those pooches have enjoyed a dramatic improvement in their standard of living). So I say, 'You know, American soldiers have always been kind to dogs...' And Liz Pederson interrupts and says, 'Oh YEAH! They kill CHILDREN, but they're kind to dogs!' Four years later, I still regret that I did not break a chair over her head. And say, 'Gee, Liz, if any American soldier killed a child, it must have been that those soldiers were gay...because everybody knows gays kill children. I mean you've heard of John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Wayne Williams, and the original Bluebeard. All gay, all killed children.'

In case any slow learners are reading this, if I had made that statement, I would have been being horribly unfair- every bit as horribly unfair as Liz Pederson slandering every person who has ever worn an American uniform. (That November, I refrained from asking her why she was supporting a Child Killer for President...or maybe she only slurred American soldiers and not sailors.) Pop Quiz: Since I was in the Navy, announcing that you're gay gets you a honorable discharge; you're not getting back in. Does anybody want to guess what the Navy's policy on homosexual conduct as back during WWII? Anybody what to guess?

About a week after that lunch incident, I overheard Liz comment that someone she knew was in Iraq, and the general effect of her words that he and his buddies probably were enjoying themselves, because that way they could do all the drugs they wanted to. I managed to check my initial urge to break a chair over her head, and instead said, in as calm and level a voice as I could manage, 'Uh, Liz, you are off by one hundred eighty degrees.' (I think that is a very diplomatic way of saying 'YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG')

I kept my cool, and told her that in the mid70s, drugs were a TERRIBLE problem- there was a plane crash on a carrier that killed something like 20 crewmen- autopsies showed that more than half of them had cannabis in their system. When I as in Language School at Monterey '80-'81 we were having a bunch of people getting busted for pot. In 1983 the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Heywood came out with a really strict program of testing, and the percentage of pot users declined further. By the time I was teaching onboard US Navy ships with the Program for Afloat College Education '88-'90 and '93-'95, drug tests were so common that the chance of getting away with using pot was just about nil- one strike and you're out the door. If even *one* man in a four hundred man crew tested positive, it was an unwelcome surprise. (This is where obnovxious left wingers are totally schizophrenic. They make really bad jokes about service people using drugs. 30-plus years ago, those jibes had foundation, but when you point out that drug use is now certain to bring an other-than-honorable discharge, and maybe some brig time, they get all weepy for the poor druggie. No sympathy from me at all. And they won't get any from the rank and file either.) I managed to get along tolerably with Liz, making allowance for the fact that a racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist is anyone who disagrees with her.

Patrick Chavis

I am vehemently opposed to Affirmative Action. And 'Doctor' Patrick Chavis is one of many reasons. Back in the early 70s, the University of California Medical School had a quota of 16 seats reserved for minority applicants. A man named Allan Bakke sued the Medical School over that policy, and in 1978, the US Supreme Court ruled in his favor. However, the Court ruled, in a splintered opinion, that schools can consider race in admissions. (Translation: being black counts for a FULL LETTER GRADE- see the Supreme Court decision on the University of Michigan's law school admissions policy.) Of course, if you mention this fact, lefties will scream 'racist' as you until they're blue in the face.

One of the 16 applicants admitted instead of Alan Bakke was a man named Patrick Chavis. His grades and test scores were FAR lower than Bakke's but his skin was the right color, so he got in. Needless to say, he was a left-wing icon. Senator Edward Kennedy made a speech praising him. The New York Times Magazine section did a ten-page puff piece on him in 1995, even putting him on the COVER. I well remember that the concluding paragraph, the snarky comment that Dr. Allan Bakke, 'had not exactly set the world on fire' as a physician. Of course, I would be willing to bet that Alan Bakke has never been sued for malpractice. If he had, is there any doubt that the NYT would have put that news on the front page for a week running? Ah, but Patrick Chavis...well, he did not set the world on fire, but he did get sued for malpractice TWENTY-ONE TIMES. He once signed up for a seminar on doing liposuction, and (a subsequent investigation showed) only attended two of the three days of classes. Two years after the New York Times magazine put him of the cover, the California Medical Board suspended Chavis' license, finding that he'd been guilty of 94 different counts of malpractice, including killing a patient named Tammaria Cotton in a botched liposuction. 'Dr.' Chavis was murdered in 2002; the case is still unsolved. Strangely enough, neither Ted Kennedy nor the New York Times had any comment on Chavis' license suspension.

The Miracle of A5714

As many of you know, I'm quite fond of Can-You-Top-This stories from history. That being said, I think it would be difficult to top the too strange to be believed but not too strange to be believed story of Robert Max Widerman. Back in 1942, 16-year-old Robert was in a VERY bad situation: he and a dozen other members of his family- all French Jews- were on a train to Buchenwald. He was destined to be the only survivor. Only after the war, when he came home with a blue A5714 tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, did he learn that a few of his 13 siblings had survived. Despite all that he'd suffered, he went back to what he'd done before the war: singing and acting, and managed to achieve considerable success. He learned English, made it to America, and married Eddie Cantor's daughter. And he changed his name to Robert Clary. The irony about Mr. Clary's career that simply beggars the imagination is that his greatest professional success was playing 'Corporal Louie LeBeau'- a prisoner in a German POW camp in the television comedy Hogan's Heroes. Mr. Clary is still with us; he turned 82 last March.

Robert Clary with Bob Crane.