In the wake of events in Ferguson, Missouri:
Barack Obama has called for calm and reflection.
Hillary Clinton, clearly still huddling with her handlers to find the the most politically advantageous position to take, has said NOTHING.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul has called for the demilitarization of the police — the only response that might actually help black Americans in a practical way.
Nanny State, Surveillance State, Police State — ultimately they’re all connected. When government feels empowered to push you around “for your own good”, there is no rational limit to its tyranny.
Normally I can keep in check my rage against modern American Puritans, but that’s mostly because I live in Las Vegas, where vestiges of social freedom remain. When I venture out into Saudi America, I lose it.
America has become a land of moral pygmies — able to coolly tolerate the Surveillance State, the Nanny State, the epidemic of obesity, the murder and mass incarceration of blacks at the hands of the Police State, the fraud of corporate “democracy”, the subversion of The Constitution, but outraged like a ravished virgin if someone smokes a cigarette within 20 feet of the entrance to a non-smoking establishment in, say, Arizona.
To all of you Americans who support laws restricting smoking, just because you don’t happen to like the smell of tobacco smoke, among whom are many people I consider friends, I say — “Fuck you, fuck you where you breathe.” You are pathetic moral zeros who need to get a life. Now.
I love you — but you are pathetic moral zeros who need to get a life. Now.
The high point of our Arizona trip for me was a visit to Fort Verde, the best preserved of all the frontier cavalry posts in the state. Only a few post buildings remain, along with the parade ground, but it’s enough to give you a strong sense of what the place must have been like in its period of service from the 1870s to the 1890s. There’s not a lot of modern building around it that you have to overlook, as there is at Fort Hayes in Kansas, for example. Hayes was a bigger and more important post but its few 19th-Century structures are surrounded by a modern working army base.
Fort Verde, pictured above in 1879, was never a stockaded fort, like the ones you invariably see in Hollywood Westerns, and hardly any cavalry posts were — Indians almost never attacked large concentrations of soldiers, so there was no need for defensive walls.
General Charles King, whose novels give the best picture of everyday life in frontier army posts, was once stationed at Fort Verde, which served as the model for the fort in his most famous book, The Colonel’s Daughter. It was a place renowned for its civilized amenities, courtesy of the officers’ wives stationed there over the years. The commanding officer’s home, for example, below, had a mansard roof because the first commanding officer’s wife had seen them once on a trip to France and developed a fondness for them.
The post administration building survives, along with the commanding officer’s home, one building that housed unmarried officers and the post doctor’s house, all ranged on the edge of the parade ground, which feels haunted by the ghosts of many parades and formations of mounted men doing a tough job in a forbidding place.
So here they are: the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals . . . riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort Reno to Fort Apache — from Sheridan to Startle — they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode — and whatever they fought for — that place became the United States.
My sister posed in one of the uniforms the park visitors’ center provides for such purposes.
I was thinking about John Ford the whole time.
[Contemporary photos © Libba Marrian]
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On our second day in Sedona we drove south of the town so Libba could photograph the scenery for her documentary. Then we drove down to the old cavalry fort in Camp Verde, but it was closed so we settled for lunch in the town of Camp Verde at the picturesque restaurant below.
It had a spiffy old Bel Air parked beside it and pretty good Mexican food. Then we drove out to see Montezuma’s Castle.
Early visitors to the Verde Valley figured the cliff dwellings had some connection to the Aztecs, hence the name, but they were actually built by the Sinagua Indians, a local tribe. No one is quite sure why they built their houses so high up — protection from enemies, perhaps, or refuge from floods. In any case, the complex is quite impressive.
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“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and . . . blow.”
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A story illustration — no idea what the story is about but it looks intriguing.
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. . . needs a bath every ten years or so.
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I’m very amused by the authors who have sided with Hachette in its dispute with Amazon about the pricing of e-books. They want to be left out of the mix, while the two corporations sort out their differences.
Those differences concern a product, books, created by the authors in question. The idea that authors should somehow be above the fray, and suffer no consequences from the fray — because they are artists? — when they and their works are what the fray is all about is either charmingly naive or utterly insane, depending on your point of view.
I’d go with insane.
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Diana As the Personification of Night . . .
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. . . his soul and his beautiful, antic, troubled mind.
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