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Thursday, December 30, 2021

Reflections On A Year Of Mixed Results


 I shot the photo above of then "Former VP Joe Biden" in Owingsville, Kentucky, in October of 2018, at a time when there was little hope for America. Thank God, he is now President Joe Biden and since January 20, 2021, hope has returned to America.  But despite all that hope, this has still been a very mixed year of results.  Yes, after 4 years of an ongoing attempt to destroy America, American Democracy, and many other of the most basic values enshrined in the US Constitution and laws, we have a competent, committed, honest, legally and duly elected President who his working on a daily basis to save this country from "enemies both foreign and domestic".  We no longer have a TRAITOR living in the White House and I really wish that was all that is necessary to be said about that.  But it is not!  The same TRAITOR and his Right Wing Radical supporters are still attempting to subvert and destroy everything the Founding Fathers created.  Covid 19, in all its mutations and manifestations, is still destroying the country and we are in the middle of what is likely to become the worst disease surge yet of this pandemic. Sadly, Covid 19 would not have been anywhere near as bad a disaster if the TREASNOUS occupant of the White House in 2020 had done anything productive in the first 3 months of 2020 to stop the pandemic and help the country avoid the 800,000 unnecessary deaths which have occurred since then.   A worldwide shipping crisis is preventing much of commerce from happening, or at least form flowing normally, and an artificial inflation is beginning to make life hard, as inflation always does, on the lives of the lower classes.  

But the thing you need to understand about that inflation is that it is artificial and primarily created by large corporations who are taking advantage of both the pandemic and the shipping crisis to artificially and unnecessarily raise prices on everything from corn flakes to cars.  There are two new words which have come into the lexicon of economics which you should learn, remember, and fight against every day: Shrinkflation and Skimpflation.  On October 26, 2021, the NPR's "Planet Money" described Skimpflation in this way: Skimpflation is "when, instead of simply raising prices, companies skimp on the goods and services they provide."  Products are being produced in smaller packages and being sold at the same prices, or greater, as were being charged for the formerly larger packages.  Quoting once again from the NPR article this is what is happening: "Domino's is taking longer to deliver pizzas. Airlines are putting customers who call them on hold for hours. Restaurants, bars and hotels are understaffed and stretched thin. The quality of service seems to be deteriorating everywhere."  If there is a way for a major American corporation to cheat, chisel, connive, and rob the American citizen, they are doing it and blaming it on both the pandemic and the president.  Don't buy their lies!  "Business Insider" described Shrinkflation on July 18, 2021, in this way: "Shrinkflation describes brands selling smaller amounts of product for the same price as before."  You should also avoid falling into the easy mental error of confusing the two terms.  Skimpflation is a process which can affect both goods and services, along with their prices and delivery, all across the spectrum of business.  It includes issues such as never having a human answer a phone call; slow delivery of products, goods, and services; putting one smaller bar of soap in a hotel room where two larger bars used to routinely be; changing and washing those hotel sheets only when the guest requests it; and putting less of a product in a package, any product, any package.  Shrinkflation is more directly tied to amounts of product which are delivered and is accomplished by a variety of means ranging from small packages, larger prices for the same amounts, and accomplishing such feats in deceptive ways which hide the losses from the purchaser.  If Shrinkflation and Skimpflation were the only ways every American was losing today, we would have a few things to be happy about.  

The shipping crisis is real and greatly affects millions of different products which are now being made in foreign countries by or for American corporations who refuse to build those products in America while being required to pay employees a living wage.  But the major players in that shipping crisis are not truly cooperating with each other to mutually improve the situation.  The marine shipping companies are raising their prices to astronomical levels and blaming it on ports and their managers along with trucking companies, truck drivers, and their unions for those drivers who have the good sense and good fortune to belong to a union.  The ports and their managers blame various aspects of the shipping industry including both marine shippers and trucking companies and their drivers.  The facts of the matter are that our shipping ports are all outdated, poorly maintained, and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party is refusing to support President Biden in his effort to pass a major infrastructure bill which would provide money to repair, improve, and expand those ports, rail heads, roads, bridges, airports, hospitals, colleges and universities, and other major aspects of our economy.  For at least thirty years, the situation has been growing steadily worse in terms of how these major hubs of transportation have been neglected, allowed to fall into disrepair, and never expanded when the market needed it.  The shining example of how roads and bridges have been neglected is the Brent Spence Bridge which crosses the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington in my native Kentucky.  That key American bridge which sits at a major juncture of several of the largest interstate highways has been in disrepair for many years and little beyond emergency maintenance has been provided for it.  #MoscowMitch McConnell, the senate Republican leader who happens to be elected from Kentucky has even refused to support funding to repair this key bridge which serves his own state.  

The United States Postal Service has also been under a direct attack by its putative head, Louis DeJoy, who was rewarded by being appointed as head of the USPS for having been a key bundler of campaign contributions to TRAITOR Trump and was given the mission of doing as much damage to the mail system as possible in what must be assumed to be an effort to lead congress to sell it off to some of their other co-conspirators.  Luckily, President Biden has been able to gain a majority of appointees to the USPS governing board and it appears highly likely that DeJoy will soon be fired.  

America, President Biden, and the proposed infrastructure package are all being held hostage by Senator Joe Manchin, who is nominally a member of the Democratic party but has consistently voted against efforts by the president and the Democratic party to repair the country.  Sadly, Manchin is the only Democrat who can be assured of being elected in West Virginia which was once proudly and professionally represented by Democrats who gave their all to the service of the country incluing Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman Ken Hechler.  Sadly, West Virginia and Kentucky politics are generally controlled and hamstrung by the same coal barons and the Republican party who, for  a hundred years have worked to destroy both states.  

But, I began this blog post with the words that this year hope has returned to America and that is true.  But we must, as Americans, do more than hope.  We must support President Biden in his efforts to save America and American Democracy from big business, the Republican party, and Russia which stole the 2016 election in order to install TRAITOR Trump in the White House.  We must register more Democratic voters and turn them out to vote straight Democratic in every upcoming election in the country.  We must work on a daily basis to ensure that the hope we now have is fully realized and America is saved from these multiple negative and destructive forces. 

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Observations On Attending Serpent Handling Churches

Two Churches In Two States: An Ethnographic Observation Among Serpent Handling Believers

The morning of September 11, 2004, began the way most of my Saturday mornings began at that time.  I awoke at 5am and worked briefly on the computer before cutting my hair to its usual skin tight burr, showered, and awoke my wife, Candice, who is bound to a wheelchair, to assist her with her early morning routines before leaving the house to conduct a court ordered visit in the home of a client and then drive to a graduate class at Lindsey Wilson College’s branch campus program in Jackson, Kentucky. As I left the house, I inserted the Ralph Stanley “Saturday Night” CD into my player and listened to the opening song “Mountain Folk”, one of my favorites, as I thought about the weekend ahead and the people I was about to meet.

 I attended the morning session of the class as usual before leaving the all day session at 11:30am to return home to prepare for a trip to a small, rural community in Western North Carolina.  By the time Candice and I left home, I had already been up 8 hours and driven over a hundred miles.  We were on our way to an area just north of Asheville to attend the annual homecoming meeting of a tiny, but somewhat famous, serpent handling church, at the invitation of the pastor who is the brother of a deceased signs following preacher who died after receiving a rattlesnake bite while preaching in a different church in an adjacent state.  That deceased preacher’s wife had also died of a rattlesnake bite received in a similar  church in a third state about five years earlier.  Their five children had become orphans upon the deaths of their parents and were being cared for by their father’s surviving parents who were also signs following believers.  The grandparents continued to handle serpents as did their sole surviving son  and his wife.  I felt honored that I was about to meet these people about whom I had read so much and yet, somehow, knew that I knew so little.  I state for the record at this point that I have chosen to leave these people and all the serpent handling believers I have known anonymous for their own privacy and peace of mind.  

I left West Liberty, Kentucky, and drove south through Salyersville, Prestonsburg, and Pikeville toward Western North Carolina, where we intended to stay in a motel about 20 miles from the church.  From Prestonsburg to North Carolina, much of the route was along US 23 and wove through the mountains of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina in settings which reminded me of my childhood as a native Appalachian and helped to prepare me for this initial experience in a world about which I had been told since childhood, the world of the signs followers or “snake handlers”, as their detractors so often refer to them.  It is important to state that such a misnomer is just that, nothing more, nothing less.  Serpent handling believers is more appropriate nomenclature since their actions are based on their personal interpretation of Mark 16: 17-18 from the King James Bible.  To these people the poisonous reptiles which they sometimes handle in church as a sign of their faith are quite simply a sacramental object much as the bread and wine in a communion service.

We arrived at our motel in North Carolina to learn that the city had been flooded and was without water which the reservations clerk had not told my wife when she made the reservation the day before.  I looked at the time and realized I had only an hour and a half before church began 25 miles away.  The clerk informed me that the water would likely be on that night or the next morning and I chose to stay in the motel.  I did not have time to drive from motel to motel searching for a wheelchair accessible room suitable for my wife which had running water when my first opportunity to be an ethnographic participant-observer of the signs following world was at stake. 

We checked in and quickly changed clothes to go to the church.  I helped Candice to put on a long green dress, hose, and plain black dress shoes before putting on my own simple blue dress shirt and white khaki pants. It was our intent to respect the customs and beliefs of these people and to dress in a similar manner to the clothes they wear on a daily basis.  We drove to the little courthouse town near which the church is located, got last minute directions at the fire house, and proceeded to the church.  Our first trip up the holler revealed a small, treated wood church in an idyllic setting.  But no one was visible in the parking lot.

 Just down the hill, at the next driveway, several dozen cars were parked, an open tent was set up, and tikki torches burned.  We turned in the driveway and were met by a young man who looked baffled when we asked for the pastor by name.  It seemed that this gathering was either a party or a wedding and we decided to travel to a gas station at the forks of the road for more precise directions.  At the forks of the road, we saw a man of about seventy with hair cropped as short as my own and a plain shirt only slightly darker blue than mine standing outside his car.  On the hunch that he might be a member of the congregation, I asked where I might find the pastor.  The man introduced himself by name and told me he knew where the person I was seeking would be in about thirty minutes.  We followed him back to the church and this time found the pastor and his family standing on the little covered porch.  I recognized him instantly from the many photos I had seen in books about their religion. 

We introduced ourselves and the pastor recognized my name from conversations we had previously.  The pastor and the man who had led me to the church shook hands, hugged each other, and obviously were well pleased to be together again.  They spoke of the time since they had seen each other, talked of growing older, and of events that had transpired in their lives.  It suddenly struck me, when the pastor smiled and said “The Lord has been good to me”, that this was a unique and resilient man who loved his God and lived his faith.  No man on the face of the earth had more reason to doubt his beliefs than this man and yet, in the first three minutes I had been in his presence, he had reaffirmed his faith in the justness and fairness of God.  He had lost his only brother and sister-in-law, as well as numerous friends, to religiously based snake bites and poison ingestion, had been involved in a long drawn out custody battle, along with his parents, in their effort to retain custody of their grandchildren, and yet he freely and happily reaffirmed that “The Lord has been good to me”. 

As the two men caught up on recent events in their lives, I noticed a small cemetery at the edge of the hill below the church.  It contained several graves shaded by trees, planted with Hosta, azalea, and rhododendron.  It was a quiet, peaceful, and even idyllic setting.  I walked to the graves and began reading markers as I have done since childhood when I was growing up near three small such cemeteries in Knott County Kentucky.  The first name to strike me was a man who had died after drinking strychnine in a church service.  I realized that, finally, I was standing on some of the most hallowed ground of the signs following world and I was glad to be there.  I knew I had come to the right place to learn the truth about these people.

Shortly afterward, the congregation began to trickle in from the road.  They were men in plain shirts and simple pants like my own, women in long dresses and long hair, children who had learned to obey their parents and proved it as they went to their seats.  They were clean, neat, orderly, well mannered, respectful, and obviously deeply religious.  They always shook hands, often breathed “Praise the Lord” as they greeted each other, and moved to their seats as several musicians including the pastor and his wife began to tune instruments.  There were several guitars, an organ, a set of drums, and numerous tambourines which found ready hands among the congregation. 

“Are you happy to be in the House of the Lord?” asked the pastor several times as he walked through the crowd shaking hands, greeting friends and strangers, and making even me, a visiting writer new to this world, feel welcome.  A common, simultaneous prayer was offered in rising and falling cadences and two young women in long hair, long denim dresses, and measured modesty went to the microphones at the front of the church where they began to sing with their backs to the congregation.  The music began in a driving, syncopated rhythm which often vibrated the seat beneath me.  The congregation joined in freely.  The songs changed from one to another as the music remained the same.  People began to dance in the spirit.  “Hallelujah” and “Praise The Lord” could be heard all over the house.  I was in the House of the Lord and I felt honored to be there. 

Eventually, the pastor arose to preach in a structured, well thought out sermon about obedience of the servant to the master and of the wife to the husband.  Suddenly he reached behind the lectern where an unseen serpent box lay and brought out a rattle snake about 3 feet long and held it, much like an offering, as he passed behind the altar continuing to preach.  “Amen” and “Hallelujah”, as well as “Preach it brother” and “Help him, Lord” could be heard rising intermittently throughout the congregation. 

The sermon ended and he called on several people to testify, even eventually calling on me.  I simply said, “Thank you for opening your door to a stranger”.  The service came to an end with a few songs of a less strident nature and the crowd left in the same manner in which they arrived with hand shakes, gentle words, and a few “We’ll see you in the mornings”. 

As I drove back toward my motel, the cars from the party next door mixed into those leaving the church, and the believers reentered the world.  In the motel room without water, eating a hot pickled sausage because the restaurants had no water either, I realized it was nearly midnight and I was not tired.  I knew I had come to the right place.

Sunday morning, September 12, 2004, we awoke at about 8am, found a small stream of cold water pouring from the faucet in the sink and none in the shower.  I realized that, in the overall scheme of life, this was a minor inconvenience.  Candice used bottled water to wash her hair.   I shaved in the sink and each of us used a wash cloth to perform the minimum ablutions before getting back in the van to go to church.  I stopped at the motel office and argued only briefly with the manager who refused to give any discount for the lack of water and said “I have a meeting in one hour” as I left the motel.

I drove eagerly back to the church and found only the pastor’s family there ahead of us.  I mentioned our motel inconvenience to the preacher and inquired if Candice’s blue jeans and dachshund house slippers were inappropriate for church.  He assured me that they were not and I began to help him and his sons set up a large tent for the dinner on the grounds. 

The next person to arrive was a well-known signs following preacher from Newport, Tennessee, with whom I had also been corresponding recently.  We introduced ourselves and finalized plans for Candice and me to follow him and his wife back to their home before attending services at their church in Newport that evening.  He also began to help with the tent and the crowd began to arrive.  As each family arrived, the labor became less, a series of tables beside the church grew steadily in the food they held, and the spirit of the previous evening began to multiply even before the service began.  Several congregants carried in serpent boxes of wood with hinged Plexiglas lids and arranged them side by side in front of the altar.

The service began in much the same way as the night before with a common prayer, and the music drove to what seemed to be even greater stridency.  Congregants began to dance in the spirit; a few began to speak in tongues, a young minister from Harlan, Kentucky, delivered a sermon which was fiery, exhortative, and voluble.  Once again, the pastor initiated the handling of serpents by bringing out the same rattlesnake of the night before.  But this time, several others also joined in the activity and several copperheads were also passed from hand to hand. 

The music and dancing vibrated the floors, seats, and walls of the little church.  Joy could be seen, heard, felt, and nearly touched. Adrenaline could be sensed all round the room. Several people went forward to be prayed for and have hands laid on them.  A young woman of about thirty began to dance in the spirit, went to the altar for anointing oil, and finally came to my wife Candice in her wheelchair.  Kneeling before Candice, the woman wept freely, gently removed the dachshund house slippers from each of her feet, and slowly, gently, thoroughly, lovingly caressed each foot and lower leg speaking softly worded prayers of supplication and healing.  I found myself crying profusely and the man who sat beside me said or did nothing allowing me to live within myself and the moment.  The woman gently replaced the dachshund house slippers on Candice’s  feet, and rose to pass her hands over my wife’s entire body before returning to the altar.  Then she opened a fire bottle, had it lit by the minister from Harlan and passed it along both hands and arms as she danced in front of the altar.  The minister finally took the bottle of fire from her, handled it for awhile himself, blew out the flame, and replaced it on the altar.  The young woman returned to her seat in front of me where she continued to sing and dance for several minutes.  Eventually my crying ceased, the service ended with another handling of the serpents, and the singing of songs such as “Sometimes I Feel Like Heaven’s Come Down”. 

As I walked outside to the dinner on the grounds, I suddenly realized that I know what Jim Birckhead, a tenured professor at Charles Sturt University in Australia who researched signs followers for more than thirty years, meant when he stated to me recently that he misses “being able to attend spirit filled services”.  The food was abundant, well cooked, and freely given.  Fellowship and discussion of the services and signs following beliefs continued until, at last, Candice and I said goodbye to our new friends, got into our van, and followed the Cocke County pastor across the state line to his home in Tennessee.

The winding, pristine drive across the mountains into Tennessee was the ideal setting to deescalate from the powerful, emotional experience of the service.  We crossed the French Broad River several times on US 25, passed through the little town of Hot Springs, encountered a street called Serpentine Way which seemed somehow appropriate, and finally found ourselves on the front porch of this second pastor. 

This particular man has spent much of his life attending and preaching in signs following churches and has collected a vast amount of articles, books, and photographs about the practices.  He carried several large binders of material to the porch where we shared and discussed it.  Eventually, he took me to the small, double locked outbuilding where he keeps his serpents.  We discussed serpent catching, the police intervention imposed on signs followers in his native Cocke County, and techniques for keeping serpents alive in a Tennessee  winter. 

He showed me his collection of serpents, serpent boxes, and a winter den which is dug below the frost line and lined with a large section of ceramic drain pipe.  Finally, he placed a large copperhead in a locked serpent box and we prepared to go to his church a few miles away.  As he made the final preparations to leave, he set the copperhead in the serpent box on the porch near Candice’ feet in the dachshund house slippers.  We walked back out in the yard and he showed me the rats he raises to feed his serpents while Candice watched the caged copperhead near her feet.  Before we left the house, the preacher went inside one last time to retrieve a handmade Appalachian doll which he made as a gift for Candice.  Today it sits on our mantle and has been christened in his honor.

The preacher, his wife, Candice, and I traveled the few miles to his little church in a setting nearly as idyllic as that in North Carolina.  We walked over the church grounds, looked at a second collection of memorabilia in the church and talked about signs following beliefs until 7pm, the scheduled time for services to begin.  No one else had arrived and I wondered if this minister would continue to talk to us or begin a service.  Earlier in the day, he had told me that attendance was not strong in his church and blamed it on the police attitude in Cocke County.  He stated that he continued to “show up and keep the doors open”.

But, at the stroke of 7pm, this solitary signs following minister, stepped behind the pulpit and said, “It’s time to start the service.”  The four of us sang, none well or melodiously, “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away”, our four voices joined in a weak, discordant, sometimes faltering choir and then the preacher’s wife, with her back modestly turned toward the congregation, sang a few other songs which Candice and I did not know.  Her husband stood, prayed, and began to preach from the sixth chapter of Revelations and delivered a full sermon in which he also briefly handled the copperhead.  We sang another song, the preacher said a prayer and the four of us walked out into the warm Tennessee night to say goodbye.  As we drove toward the interstate, Candice said suddenly, “You know, I think that even if we hadn’t been here, he would still have preached.”.

As I wrote these notes, I cried once again just as freely as I had when the young woman in North Carolina placed the anointing oil on Candice’ feet.  I may well never fully understand everything to which I have been exposed in these past two days.  But I do know, without a doubt, that these people are sincere, deeply religious believers who support their beliefs with their lives on a daily basis and the world is a better place because they are here.  I also know that I am a better man for having come to know them.  I have now come to know family members of three people who all died of snakebites received in church services about five years apart.  The five children of one of pair of those people are orphans who are cared for by their surviving grandparents who continue to handle serpents to this day as do their sole surviving son  and his wife.  I felt honored that I was about to meet these people about whom I had read so much and yet, somehow, knew that I knew so little.  

In the seventeen years since this unusual weekend of ethnographic study, I came to the decision to not reveal the names, personal details, or residence information about any of the serpent handling believers I have met.  I now no longer spend time among them and never completed a book I had been working on about them primarily because I realized, over time, that they have suffered far too much at the hands of both the media and researchers because of their beliefs.  They are ordinary, hard working people just about like all their neighbors around them.  They raise families, hold down ordinary jobs, strive to achieve the same dreams most of the rest of us seek.  They simply choose to interpret several key verses of the Bible differently than the majority of their peers.  They also choose to literally place their lives on the line for their beliefs on most of the occasions when they attend church.  One of the serpent handling preachers who was present at that North Carolina church when I attended the meeting described in this paper has died since from a rattlesnake bite.  In the time I knew him, I came to respect him for his dedication to his beliefs and knew full well that in the event he suffered a serious serpent bite in church he would never agree to be transported to a hospital.  He fulfilled that expectation on my part by returning to his home the night he suffered his fatal bite and died with his family and friends praying with him and for him in his bedroom. 

I do not make any judgments about these people or their beliefs and I place no negative opinions on them.  They are loyal to their religion and view a fatal serpent bite as an opportunity to be rewarded in Heaven for their faith on earth.  I cannot say they are right.  I will not say they are wrong.  They are simply people who hold beliefs which are different from those held by most of us who are in the majority.  They are to be respected, not shunned or belittled.  They should be allowed to practice their unique religious beliefs under the protection of the United States Constitution just as everyone else is.  They are no better or no worse than you or I. 

Copyright 2021 by Roger D. Hicks

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Covid 19, The Black Plague, And The Real Guilty Party

 


 

I am in the process of reading a book called "Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia" by Steven Stoll which has been widely lauded as a book about the problems of Appalachia which it happens has been written by a professor at Fordham University which is about as far from Appalachia as you can get.  This has been a common problem with books supposedly written about Appalachia in that they have often been best accepted when written by people who have little or no personal experience in Appalachia.  But Stoll is an excellent researcher who focuses the book on a long history of socio-economic issues examined from a historical perspective and I am nearly a hundred pages into the book without any clear understanding of what he seems to think went, or is going, wrong with Appalachia.  I have to admit that this a pretty long introduction by anyone's standards.  But in all that tangential socio-economic writing, I did find a real jewel from Stoll's extensive research on a vast number of topics which is highly relevant to today's world and the Covid 19 pandemic.  Here is the section of the book to which I am referring which can be found on page 51:

"Twelve galleys heavy with trade from Jaffa sailed into the port of Messina.  The Genoese crew groaned in the hold, suffering in sickness.  At least one staggered onto the wharf.  The first Sicilian he greeted received a bacterial infection from a sneeze, a cough, or maybe a flea bite.  Three days later the sailor was dead along with every Sicilian who had stood close enough to smell his breath.  The afflicted buckled with fever and hard, bleeding ulcers--the first European victims of the Black Death.  Over the next four years, as many as 50 million people perished from the plague--representing between 30 and 50 percent of the inhabitants of Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Syria, and Palestine, as well as parts of Egypt, the German Empire, and Azerbaijan.  So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell.  Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away.  "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats."  Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo."

The dead left entire town empty, fields unharvested.  The social order came apart.  People became scarce.  One region in southern France did not regain its pre-plague population until the nineteenth century.  Marginal places like mountainsides and wetlands, some settled as early as the eleventh century, lost their human presence altogether."  (Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, page 51)

There could not be a more horrifying snapshot of death and destruction written than the one above from Stoll's book.  Yet, there are very basic parallels between what he has described in Europe in the middle 14th century and what is happening in America and the world with Covid 19 today.   The Black Plague was estimated to have caused somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million deaths across the world.  It lasted roughly from 1347 to 1351.  According to Reuters, there have been, as of today, October 12, 2021, 38million cases and more than 5million deaths from Covid 19 worldwide.  There have been at least 700,000 deaths in the USA, more deaths than from the 1918 influenza epidemic, more deaths than from World War II, more deaths than any short term cause in the history of America.  And the great majority of those deaths could have been eliminated, if any appropriate action had been taken by the White House in January through March of 2020 after the intelligence community and the health care community both informed the White House that the pandemic was spreading from China and could destroy the world.  In what at the time was still being called "The President's Daily Briefing", despite the fact that TRAITOR Trump was simply the beneficiary of a Russian theft of an American election, a senior CIA official was telling the illegitimate occupant of the White House that an existential threat was facing the country and absolutely nothing was being done about it by the recipient of that erroneously named briefing.  On both January 23, 2020, and January 28, 2020, TRAITOR Trump was told, if he even listened, that Covid 19 was spreading worldwide and could destroy the world.  Nothing was done in response to those briefings.  

In the quote above from Steven Stoll's book, there is this somewhat lenghty description of the multitude of deaths due to the Black Plague in Europe: "So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell.  Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away.  "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats."  Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo."  There have also been striking parallels to the events in that description in America.  In New York City and Miami, refrigerator trucks had to be brought into hospital parking lots to hold the dead because funeral homes were so busy that they could not even store the dead. Television news showed workers in a large city cemetery on Long Island burying dozens of dead in cheap wood coffins in long trenches which had been dug with backhoes. Recently, in the heart of Appalachia in Hazard, Kentucky, the Appalachian Regional Healthcare system, the largest operator of hospitals in the Eastern Kentucky area, reported that their morgue was "at capacity" and a local funeral home was loaning their morgue to the hospital for temporary storage of the bodies of Covid 19 victims.  In a recent week in my home county of Morgan County Kentucky which has a population of slightly more than 13,000 people, one local funeral home had 4 dead bodies waiting to be buried and had buried more than 10 in the preceding month.  Historically, over the 28 years I have lived in this county, each of the two local funeral homes would rarely have two dead bodies awaiting burial at any given time.  During the recent week I am discussing, one of those funeral homes held a joint funeral for two elderly sisters who had both died from Covid.  And those numbers are not an anomaly in today's world in any place in America.  Thirty-five hospitals in Kentucky have been forced to call for assistance from  the National Guard.  The life expectancy in America in 2020 dropped by nearly two years overall and both African Americans and Hispanics saw even greater shrinking of their life expectancy.  

Never forget that this could have been greatly mitigated in America if the TRAITOR Trump had been competent in his illegal occupancy of the White House.  He was unconcerned in early 2020 and has been ever since. He has laughingly suggested that Americans could treat Covid 19 by injecting cleaning chemicals into their bodies and promoted several untested and unapproved drugs as cures for Covid 19 as his followers have begun to use horse wormer in the hope they might live over the disease.  All 700,000 deaths from Covid 19 in America are on his hands.  




Monday, September 27, 2021

Aphorisms, Quips, and Non-sequiturs From Roger Hicks

 I have contemplated for quite some time to post a list of some of my favorite aphorisms, quips, and pithy statements as aphorism is sometimes defined.  You will be likely to like a few of these, hate others, and possibly even accuse me of being unfairly prejudiced against one or several groups of people, but very unlikely to accuse me of being prejudiced against any race or ethnicity.  Here we go!

  1. No Republican in the country is fit to hold any position of public trust unless they first and foremost call for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of the TRAITOR Donald Trump for all of his many crimes up to and including TREASON!  Now that about half of you are awake and unjustifiably angry let's go on.
  2. The most frequently used word in the English language is "Lady"!  As my dear old Daddy used to say, "Not everyone who squats to pee is a lady!  For hundreds of years, the primary definition of "Lady" was "a woman who is polite and well educated, has excellent manners, and always behaves well".  That should still be the primary definition of the word.  
  3. The second most frequently misused word in the English language is "fiancee".  For hundreds of  years, the primary definition of the word "fiancee" was "the woman that somebody is engaged to".  That should still be the primary definition.  Nowadays, the word "fiancee" is generally used to mean "the person with whom I cohabit" or "the person with whom I am publicly known be having sex regularly."  The prevalent current usages of the word are generally a very weak defense against anyone whose morals are offended by sex outside of marriage, cohabitation, or any form of casual sex.  If you want to test my theory about the current use of the word "fiancee" and see two people grimace openly, the next time anyone introduces their current sex partner to you as their "fiancee", smile broadly, say "Congratulations, when is the wedding?"  
  4. The third most frequently, misused word in the English language is "gentleman".  For hundreds of years, the primary definition of the word "gentleman" was "a chivalrous, courteous, or honorable man".  That should still be the primary definition and usage. You will actually see and hear witnesses or victims of crimes such as robbery or assault say into a television camera or radio microphone "the gentleman stuck a gun in my face" or "the gentleman was beating his wife when I began recording".  You can rest assured such people are not gentlemen.  You can also rest assured that I can not now be accused of being unfair to either women or men as a group since I have now written about the misuse of both words of reference to the genders. 
  5. No one should be able to gain and hold a job in any white collar setting who cannot write in cursive, do math in their head without any form of electronic device or pencil and paper, or who cannot tell the difference between all the words on a list of the most frequently misused homonyms.  Just this week, I saw on a news graphic on a CBS station in my area, "they're" being used as "their" on the 6pm evening news in a city of 300,000 people.  In a metropolitan area with something in the neighborhood of a quarter to a half million people, a major network television affiliate should be able to hire someone with a college education who can write, spell, and add.  I have said for many years now that if  I were still hiring people I would have the secretary in my office give each applicant who came in for an interview a yellow legal pad and a ball point pen with these instructions: "Please leave all your electronic devices on the corner of my desk, take a seat at the desk on the other side of the room and write in cursive a complete paragraph, composed of complete sentences with correct spelling, grammar, syntax, and sentence structure to explain why you are the best candidate for this job.  The interviewer will be with you in about fifteen minutes."  
  6. No well constructed sentence begins or ends with the word "So".  Today, it is far too common to hear people begin every sentence with "So..." as if they believe it is necessary for them to explain what they are saying in advance.  And no well constructed sentence ever ends with "So..." which is the word "So" followed by an ellipsis as if the person either believed they really had more to say or that they finally realized they had nothing more they could think of to add.  
  7. If you cannot carry on a conversation without using "Like" in the middle of every description without every saying which two things you believe are alike you have no business using the word ever.  "Like" is intended to be an indicator of a comparison between two similar things and is never an appropriate filler word.  When you use it in that manner, what you are actually saying is "I don't know what else to say."
  8. The frequent use of the phrase "You know" in the middle of sentences is just as bad, if not worse, than the aforementioned use of the words "Like" and "So".  I can assure if I actually knew what you are trying to tell me I would not need you to tell me, "you know".  
  9. Never trust a church or a funeral home which uses a neon sign to attract business.
  10. Never trust a church with the words "community", "independent", or "non-denominational" in their name.  The use of such words to deliver the message that the church stands alone also deliver the message to me that the founders of that church did not choose to bound by any denominational oversight or constraints.  It also tells me that the leadership mistakenly consider themselves to be somewhat flawless in their doctrine and judgment since they will not allow the leadership of other churches and/or denominations the right to inspect, oversee, or criticize them.
  11. A Drug Is A Drug Is A Drug!  No drug of abuse should ever be legalized and marijuana is a drug of abuse and a classic gateway drug just as is alcohol.  
  12. Never listen to a preacher who tells you how to vote or a politician who tells you how to pray!
  13. Puerto Rico should be a US state.  Washington, D. C., should not be a US state.  If you don't understand that, study the history of how all native Puero Ricans, born as US citizens, are deprived of many of the rights and governmental services afforded to all other US citizens and also read the history of how and why the District of Columbia was created. 
  14. Every American citizen should be afforded a free public education either for a four year college degree or a two  year vocational degree whichever is most appropriate to the individual. 
  15. All students in every public school in America should be denied access to all electronic devices until they prove they can read, write, and do basic math at the first grade level.  
  16. Every American citizen should be eligible to receive all necessary medical care under a nationwide government run health care system such as those used in the most civilized countries in the world.  This system, along with all government expenses should be paid by a graduated income tax with the richest individuals and corporations paying taxes proportionate to the income they receive. 
  17. No doctor or other prescriptive level medical professional and no member of their immediate family should ever be allowed to own any interest in a pharmacy. 
  18. Physical Education should be a requirement for one hour each day in every grade in every public school in America all the way from K to 12.  You would be amazed at how much lower the negative disciplinary and behavioral problems would be and how much obesity would drop.   
  19. Civics should be taught in every American school at the 4th and 9th grade levels.
  20.   Always Vote Democratic!  If you don't understand that one, go back and closely read a good college freshman level American history book.
   Now that I have pissed a few of you off, think about all I have said here and you probably won't be nearly as pissed off in the long run.  Come back in a few days because I will probably add a few more to this list. 

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

"Duets" by Edwina Pendarvis & Harry Geig--Poetry

 

This is a little, self-published, 24 page book of poetry by the Huntington, West Virginia poets Edwina "Eddy" Pendarvis and Harry Geig.  Eddy is a professor emeritus from Marshall University and her partner, the late Harry Geig, retired from the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers.  Eddy and I have been friends for several  years and, sadly, I never knew Harry.  Both were widely known, at least in Appalachian and West Virginia poetry circles for the quality of their writing.  While I would not clearly classify everything in this little book as love poems it is constructed and published with love and strong emotions based in a relationship which lasted literally to the day of Harry's death.  My one objection to the book, and one  I  have had with other multi-authored books of poetry is that the individual poems are not labeled as to specific author.  But this is a really nice little book of which I had known for several years but had never been able to locate a copy until recently.  The book was published under the company name Shoestring Publications, Lavalette, West Virginia, and was no doubt done in a very small press run of no more than a thousand copies based on how rarely it ever appears for sale on used book websites.  Since the only Shoestring Publications I can locate on the internet has a Maine land line number, I suspect this book was not done by that company and was, instead, a single effort with a private printer and the authors.  

As I said in my first few sentences, both Edwina Pendarvis and Harry Geig have been recognized as serious and high quality poets in Appalachia and West Virginia for quite a few years.  The book is filled to overflowing with high quality poetry and is remarkably consistent in tone and flow for a book with multiple authors. I have previously read works by both authors and each has always had a unique style in my opinion.  I believe I can sometimes discern which of the two wrote a particular poem but not always.  Harry's poetry tends to flow like scat music, street talk, and is usually about human interactions in an urban environment.  Eddy Pendarvis' poetry often has a more rural, less edgy quality to it.  But I won't bother you my guesses as to which author wrote which poems in the book.  Instead, let's talk about some of my favorite poems and lines in this little jewel.  

The poem "Come and See" opens and closes with some finely chosen words which clearly show the love with which they were written: 

When a long-dead comet    un-named

showered us with an after-image    of meteors 

I went with you   to a hilltop

to watch   you

.....

Whenever   wherever

eye-bright fireworks rise   and die

in a black

                      and purple night    it's you

it's you I want to see  

That opening and closing pair of stanzas is what a well-written love poem is all about.  

The poem "Soldier" is longer than most in the book and chronicles a sad, end of life story about a strong, effective soldier in his "shiny black Pony-ac Ventura...during the strike (but the assailants are still unidentified)".  These couple of lines paint a picture of a strong, effective man in a bad situation who is able to hold his own.  But because the poem is an end of life story, we come to the closing lines and find a seventy-two year old man who speaks out about about being robbed "...three kids callin' me pops..."  and he "...couldn't do nothin' about it...not a fuckin' thing."  That is a strong story about an old man, near death, complaining about his weakness and inability to defend himself.  

The next to last poem in the book, "Christmas or Anytime, Honey" is one of the real, heart string tugging love poems which make the book the little jewel it is: 

"But listen, If you were dying, I'd save you.  I'd stand

at the foot of the bed, challenge Death to his old game, and, 

lousy player that I am, 

I'd win anyway."  

That is just about as strongly poetic a statement of love as I have ever read.  

If you can locate a copy of this little jewel somewhere in a used book store, yard sale, online book seller, grab it up, read it, and enjoy it to your heart's content just as I have.