Where Is Your Next Hostage Crisis This Time?

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL ~ Jonathan Swift

Today, almost everyone I know  worries about possible terrorism, both domestic and foreign-borne.  That's long been the case.  Many in 1981, directly before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, had endured the 1979-81 Iran hostage crises. 

I know I worried over that. .  

 

The fear the crisis bore wasn't enough to flatter my own suspicions of how a highly charismatic man who knew how to work a crowd, could almost automatically end a crisis that had lingered for over a year.  No wonder Reagan thrilled the country.  He deployed rhetoric that politically overwhelmed then-incumbent Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.  

Why wouldn't charisma win? The US?  Exhauisted. The American people? Manipulated by the hostage crisis and alarm thereof.  Sixty-six Americans--diplomats, support staff, general personnel--all hostages.  Terror.  

Then, like magic, Iranian extremists released all hostages the day before Reagan took office.  

At 26, though unaware of politics and the new word, ideology, I do remember my suspicions that something smelled about the timing of crisis and the release. No one liked what had happened.

But who appreciates theocratic extremist-concocted terroristm. Vindictive revenge. Ostensibly, that had ensured because the CIA allegedly had undermined an Iranian king's acscension to the Iranian throne. Mohammed Mosaddegh, rightful ruler per the extremists ,had been replaced by Mohammed Reza Pahlavi,the West's preferred choice.  Operation Ajax in 1953 apparently brewed rage in addition to Western interests.  

Publicly, America hung stunned, surprised.  

However, in 1976, the year I graduated from college, I recall a vague awareness of sharp rage shrieking from a curio cabinet located beside the University Center's steps.  Wild demands, slogans writ in bold red.  And a name: Khomeini.  

Students there remained ignorant of the Iranian Revolution's precursor: rage hot as boiling oil.  

The curio cabinet display?  Most laughed at another curio cabinet stunt: a clearly talented young art student had "magically" stacked a Coke bottle tower into precarious, glassy balance.

Coolsville.   

One student thumped the cabinet and the sculpture collapsed.  Political significance?  I mean, who knows, right?  

However, when I look back at the Me Decad'e's inception, basically a fashion statement after much trouble once the Vietnam conflict had ended, today I recall how Eldridge Cleaver and numerous other Black Panthers, as well as white antiwar activists trucked out to Algeria and elsewhere in the Near and Middle East and Stockholm [the name: stock islet].  

Let's play with acronyms: ME could mean "Middle East". 

Where was I at directly after the hostage crisis ended in 1981?  Funny anyone should ask.   

Early cosplay.  Recruited to membership (by default) by the Dallas-born Church of the Subgenius.  No. Seriously.  Then I received "a communique" from "Conga Dave", a weird yet  prescient Church outcast . A call-up: to Conga Dave's "guerrilla cadre", Primitive Life.  

Congas?  The guy'd show up at parties, uninvited, and bang congas.  

After all, terrorism had not relinquished its fearful vibe by 1982.  Everybody, afraid.  Primitive Life, under "commandante" Conga Dave, designed "a terrorist attack", a mockery, almost comedy: "guerrillas" schemed to "kidnap" the founder of The Church of the Subgenius.  

First we "kidnapped" ourselves.  Shipping ourselves to Turtle Creek Park, a park across the street from a Robert E. Lee statue, we neared the Dallas Theater Center, historic Frank Lloyd Wright miracle of a building.  

Along the area's periphery, we "found" a strange formation: steely U's, thick ones, pounded into the ground.  We posed on the dirt, tying arms and legs to the hoops.  That was fun, I think.  

Then everybody went to Conga Dave's place to get stinkin' drunk.  I know I did.  A pretty woman, "profiled"as a Patty Hearst character got so shickered she vomited.  Then...?  

Off to the "Subgenius HQ". In Oak Cliff.  Lo, worshipers, we hath "abducted" Ivan Stang, founder of the Church.  Squirreled him off to "an undisclosed location", forced him to drunken himself.  

Ominous ransom call: 

"We have Stang!  You shall never see Stang again unless you tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree!

The one out front. 

Negotiations, arguments, confrontational gridlock: all faked.  Funny.  Finally, after we trundled to Stang's house, Stang tied up (loosely) in the back and being fed Coors tall boys, we hit the target home four times. Finally, Subgenius HQ relented:  

Mission accomplished: yellow ribbon tied around the old oak tree.  The Great Game, revisited.

Is upshot to this possible?

The years surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis had kept everyone across the country on edge.  Priorly, two fabricated oil crises had disrupted the 1970s, both contributing to the defeat of Carter in 1980, partial reasons for "stagflation".  

Poetry?  San Francisco Rose, a neighborhood bar. The Old Moon. an arty nick-nack showplace. attended one open session at the latter in 1980.  One reading at the latter featured a Native American storyteller.  She told a story about two men gesturing in anargument involving an egg.  

Terrorism is a serious quandary. Most view terrorism as physical threats, torture, internment, and murder. However, what about today's terrorism?  

Seems to me, it's economic in nature: "You're poor, so here, your SNAP benefits are cut off." 

Who's the generalissimo behind that one? 

Is it domestic terrorism yet?  Someone somewhere needs to be domesticated if putting in an artificial famine atop the poor is "the way to go".  

In other news, today I noticed a photo on TV: House Speaker Mike Johnson.  His future as Speaker is in question.  

Mike Johnson, to put it in the euphemistic universe of 1970s era slang, looks "chapped".  

*

Off the TV set directly in time for the local news last night, I thought I'd stop to see what horrors, what dangers, what hopeless situations North Texas has encountered to all our despair, and found...what?

Terror! The lead intro on the CBS affiliate? The "sickening development" involving the sale of alcohol to a soon-to-open suburban stadium where children "will be present".

I've long suspected that local station of being "the arm and sword" of some poshlust lords out there. Not too surprised, really. The First Baptist Church here is one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the nation. While I've also noticed after some meditation over where things like alcohol and money collide with the values Jesus taught around 2,000 years ago, I've also noticed that, no, the crass American version of 19th Century Victorianism does not necessarily translate into Christianity at all.

Jesus may have been prudent, and may have taught about excess and the inessential drive for luxury (like a church so large it has to build a wall to keep homeless, outcast, "dirty people" like Lazarus out of its massive fountain); but di seriously doubt he was prudish, especially not what many I know would call "a prude".

Why the force-feed? Does that fall under the old rule of "If it don't fit force it!"? It's fine for those who believe that the very first mission of Christianity is spreading the gospel; but aren't actions louder than words? What does repression (such as Roman repression of Jerusalem), or restriction (like giving someone the death penalty for vandalizing a hypocritical "store" in the alcove of the Holy of Holies) have to do with the open heart, faith in the world (not limited to some words in a book), and hope, and especially (here we go again)...

Care. Or charity.

Charity in the case of a hegemonic sect does not seem to be in operative order. Nope. Rather, some sort of dominion tactic is designed to literally scare the bejesus out of those innocent to faith. Nope. Can't drink. What about the children? Yep. The old, unreasoned rhetorical fallacy called "appeal to pity".

Oh, those poor children who are playing ball like their lived depended on it. While daddy is having a beer, or while mommy is sipping a little wine? Preposterous! Thus cry the prudes who believe absolute abstinence, save for abstinence involving the dollar, is necessary to "save" us all.

From what?

I'm not going to dive back into the concept that baptism is an affirmation. I sincerely doubt there is any magic involved. That magic act is similar to a newspaper column I read only Friday: A columnist witnessed: Her first view of a new Kim Kardashian TV show sent her to an entirely different dimension. Funny that the ancient Buddhists, when their early missionaries traveled from India to China, encountered a religion of utter duality--at least as understood by those who could see the Taoist ying-yang symbol and never cast a thought to examine what the little dots on the inside of the two "fishes" could possibly mean.

Apparently, at least from some accounts, the ancient Taoists sometimes enforced duality in a political, and cultural, sense. What did the Buddhist missionaries do? They broke the rules, then illustrated that, without reason, the totalitarian nature of restrictive duality (good versus evil, of saved versus unsaved, of Heaven versus Hell), did not need to rule all thought, word and deed.

Why do so many seem to get every little thing in their heads backwards? I'm not speaking from atop a high horse here. I am only observing that, should the bubble of restrictive duality pop, what is going to occur? What if "the apocalypse or "revelation" is a commonplace that doesn't need to be engineered? Why would the god of all want to destroy his creation?

Who are the destroyers out there?

After a propagandistic preview of "total destruction of children by the sinful disaster of selling beer", I then learned that, somehow, the weather was going to get so cold today that, from the tenor of the blaring "if it bleeds it leads" deal, the end of all living things is going freeze whatever life is left.

Yes, while it is perfectly reasonable to take steps to preclude the plumbing should a hard freeze suddenly spring upon the world, why is today's temperature 57 degrees at 11:30 on Sunday morning.

Whoa! Batten down the hatches! A freeze is about to come! What freeze? Who will freeze? What about the children who perpetrate such wild-eyed weirdness?

Last night, I watched a 1989 Jim Jarmusch movie: the heralded "Mystery Train". Near the end, as Joe Strummer, an Englishman caught up in Memphis, Tennessee, has begun to come to grips with his horrific and impulsive crime (he shot his friend played by Steve Buscemi in his left thigh), his running buddy complains over the heavy drinking and the sorrow by calling the two white guys "snowflakes".

I laughed. How easy it is to completely reinterpret a probably common tease or epithet into some kind of blunt instrument with which to label "Libbies". Wow. The cultural appropriation of a phrase used by Blacks in order to basically compare Liberals to, um, white people.

Those conservatives: Don't they have enough soul for the rest of us already?

The movie circles around two unifying factors that occur in each of the three triptych settings: a gunshot, and Elvis' version of "Blue Moon." Lovely, right? The main protagonists of all three settings are foreigners: A 20-something Japanese couple that has traveled from Yokohama to Memphis all to see Graceland and Sun Records, a smallish studio that produced much of the "race music" of the Forties and Fifties, including songs by Elvis, the King of rock and roll; an Italian woman whose husband has suddenly died who, in grief, is stuck in the bad part of Memphis for the night; and then a gang of three devil-may-care crazies who, with Strummer in the lead, go along with Strummer's British snark about Elvis being nothing but white hype, a talented singer given all kinds of credit for being a rock and roll innovator when, in reality, "negro radio" had been blossoming the genre for at least a decade, possibly more.

Strummer calls Elvis "fake". And the reality of "Blue Moon" caught up in the noisy background does in fact reveal a flatness the recordings seem to hide. That's what I noticed.

The gunshot: It occurs to three different parties, and via context, it means different things to each. As does "Blue Moon": to the couple, it is the rare occurrence of seeing a dream shared by two foreign devotees of Presley; to the Italian woman, the song reflects her grief over the sudden death of her husband; and to the gang of three drunks, it is the end of wild-eyed fun and games.

Is there more to a gunshot in Memphis? Does anyone remember April 4, 1968? The tragic loss of a great civil rights leader felled by one shot. As he overlooks the area around the motel in which he and his closest allies are staying for one night. That clearly meant different things to all people who experienced the one-shot murder of a great man.

"A Blue Moon"? Anyone? What does that mean?

The weather report? Disaster! Horror! The pipes under all the green green grass of North Texas--burst, broken, inoperable. How terrifying. But what does that mean in a metaphorical sense?

Who pulled the fire alarm in a metaphorical way?

The man on the bed in the fleabag hotel in Memphis labels his two running buddies snowflakes. Has anyone else been labeled only to realize the possibility some out in fantasyland have been working tirelessly to make the label stick?

Why? Who tore the first page out of the New Testament? That tells of the inauspicious birth of Jesus. Was that a case of a "divinely illegitimate birth"? Or is it a story of a miracle?

Who has the last judgment there?

Outside my apartment complex, oddly named The Reserve, stood a sign yesterday afternoon: FREEZE WARNING.

Yes, tonight, this Sunday night, temperatures are slated to hover near freezing. I love cold weather. It's about time as far as I'm concerned.

Why? Excessive heat from the ever sunny sun can be stressful and exhausting. Sometimes it's hotter outside here that it could kill the ghost of "Elvis". Who does appear to the Italian woman in "Mystery Train". She's already been conned by a sharper in a restaurant (he tries to tell her a tired story about Elvis the hitchhiker, and then attempts to sell her "Elvis' comb".

Ah, the metaphors are astounding. Hype, hype, hype. Then as credits roll, listeners are treated by the original Junior Parker and Sam Phillips-penned song, "Mystery Train".

One irony of the US's only serious contribution to music--the blues--almost died in the American South. Who resurrected the blues?

Europeans. Odd, isn't it. Mayall, Burdon, Fleetwood Mac, Blues Breakers, and may more took the occluded "race music" away from hurtful people, and brought it to the entire world.

But importantly, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the fleabag motel night clerk, almost repeats the often-inside joke of the blues: It's not about singing about feeling bad; it's music that lifts people up.

Why that old timey freeze warning? It's 2025. Some of us need to get over whatever it is they refuse to address.

*

All the time it seems I read dispatches from prominent human beings that, for all intents, could all be titled, "Let Me Tell You About My Summer Vacation". Not that there's anything wrong with this. Almost all human beings need rest once in a while.

Even the world's "toppest" executives and owners (all on toppest allest the timest!) deserve a break. But what does vacation mean?

Apparently not much. Not this time around. I mean, who gave who the idea that it would be "totally cool" to practically shut down all US air traffic only weeks before Thanksgiving Day. Most of us know what that is: It's the day we honor the fact that several Native American tribes (these are "brown" or "red" people) stepped in to aid beleaguered European outcasts during an especially cold first winter near Plymouth Rock, a spot on the rocks in what is now a US state called Massachusetts.

Remember that? Some humans saw some humans having an awfully hard time learning how to farm without all the tools and tactics some may or may not have known as civilized denizens of an entirely European version of civilization.

What? You mean there is more than one way to civilize oneself? Say it isn't true! You mean some civilized beings (people who are civilized enough to know that putting others first before self-interest--which is for toddlers--is perhaps the best way to get alone with one another--stepped forward to put some strangers before themselves and thus helped perfect strangers survive in what many of the perfect strangers might have seen as a "horrid land occupied by the devil"?

Nah. Civilization is "fake news!". So some claim. After all, if we choose, and choose quite blithely, to atomize civilization in a sort of into-monad-hewn randomness, only those capable of taking advantage of the chaos are going to profit.

What, in all honesty, is profit?

I have a slightly different opinion about the Pilgrims. It's not necessarily a negative opinion; but I do believe the one I've reasoned out may have plenty of validity when we consider the current theocratic epidemic sweeping the nation like the probable influenza that later ran roughshod on the very Pilgrims who had been busy concocting ways to "save" "the heathens" who, in all actuality behaved in a far more Christian fashion than the Pilgrims later did.

Perhaps it's not part of the commonly spread "myth influenza" that the Pilgrims, once upon a rock in Massachusetts, were refugees, not necessarily from some far-distant and convenient scapegoats in Great Britain, but from their own hubris and arrogance: They'd been evicted from Britain for being pests. So many Puritans like them sailed over to Netherlands--so they could pester the citizens of that country. Hence, when Netherlands gave the Puritans the boot, they decided they needed to go find a vast, unpopulated land they could begin "the Kingdom Heaven" from the dirt on up.

Many Pilgrims didn't know how to sail. Many Children of the Lord God Almighty died on the way. Was that because they'd sinned? Nah. It's because most of them hadn't the faintest idea of what they were doing.

Kicked outta England--someone else is to blame! Kicked outta Netherlands--someone else is to blame! Then, worst of all, when a possibly foreign (to them) strain of the flu made most of the Pilgrims sick as dogs--blame somebody else!

Out of "God-willed" vengeance, the Pilgrims then devastated no less than five Native American villages populated by the same people who had fostered their survival.

This, in some minds in 2025 America, is called "an attitude of gratitude". Or something. I'm not sure where the logic is.

Many testimonies in regard or disregard of the facts surrounding the Pilgrims' early North American experiences with "brown people" exist. I've read the old saws in elementary school history books. I've also read some alternative histories, most of those fact- not myth-based. It's not as if fact-based history is "without faith". In my opinion, fact-based histories are all about faith: faith in Reason. No one has a lock on faith. And, after reading some of the true political philosophers who aided in the foundation of the United States--Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Franklin, Paine, and many more, all of them secular (at least by today's minority that seems to worship exceptionally narrow and elitist standards), I managed to learn at least one important fact:

Faith without Reason is bunk. That's right. Inaccurate. After all, to all the professed Christians I have an important question: If God gave humans the ability to reason, is it a sin to refuse to use a Gift of God?

No, we're not going go into a quite popular fiction in today's commercialism-dominated zeitgeist: instrumental reason. What's that? If one wants a thing, one finds a way to turn reason into a tool that aids in getting that thing. That form of reason is neither Kantian pure reason, nor is it what Locke described: common sense.

I refer readers to a book popular in the early 2000s: "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong." Sure. James W. Loewen's survey of what many others--historian Howard Zinn perhaps the most prominent--is perhaps only one aspect of the story of the Pilgrim's. Lowen's survey is well-documented. I don't think some of the first-person documentary testaments are entirely accurate. At least we do have access to Encyclopedia Britannica.

I can hear it now from the self-righteous: "Lies! From the pit of Hell!"

Right-e-oh: Say it long enough--that the US is and always was a Christian country--and nope, that doesn't make that a historical fact.

How about this instead? "No one knows the truth."

I've always believed the very best two-word description of contemporary US civilization is this:

Nobody's perfect.

But what do any of my ruminations about Thanksgiving versus the Halloween of Thanksgivings versus the Our Thanksgiving is Righteous But Yours Is Not have to do with today's contemporary weirdness surrounding, well, name any holiday you want. Today's Veterans Day. Who's the Number One Veteran? Who's the Number One Veterinarian who is going to "treat all the human secular liberal freaks to a real good time in Satan's Kingdom"?

I'm writing neither facetiously nor fey here. I respect the men and women who came home after fighting horrific wars. And to think I started out with the idea of giving others a vacation.

In other words, in deep concern over my seeming recalcitrance in regard to the outright and absolute demand we follow a myth and forget reason altogether unless we turn reason into a tool for which to get stuff, why would I ever make my own observational demand?

If one desires respect, one must first desire respect for others. First. Not second.

This others first, ourselves second idea was neatly encapsulated by my best friend and neighbor back in 1964: "Joy means: 'Jesus, Others, Yourself".

How did that easily encapsulated concept get lost in 2025?

Let's thus go to a sort of dialectical negation as waged by many philosophers, not merely those Marxian members of the Frankfort School: Let's instrumentalize faith. Instrumental faith?

Let's turn faith into a tool so we can get some stuff!

Wow. That freaks even me out completely.

I wanna vacation from that kind of backwards thinking: A Christian nation? "Let's start there and then stack us some facts to make it look like we were right all along. And then, if some wiseacre points out the error of our ways, all we have to do is say something like, 'God gives us the power of interpretation, and this our interpretation is backstopped by God Almighty!"

I cannot fail to express my opinion that such rudimentary assertions are so primitive that civilization had nothing to do with this "backstopped by Jesus" thing. From long before Jesus walked a smallish bit of an entire planet, autocrats of the ancient past, and likely in prehistory, backstopped all kinds of oppression, repression, and ideological pestilence on their various concepts of gods.

Vacation. Not merely a song by the Go Go's.

In 2010, a kindly friend (who isn't a Christian in the narrowest sense of even The Word), knowing I'd been through veritable hell of surviving leukemia; he suggested we take a road trip--to Palo Duro Canyon. Palo Duro Canyon, as I found out first-hand after a little contempt for the concept of the Great Plains having anything remotely similar to a canyon as seen in cowboy movies, is an amazing place. The wondrous spot hides less than 27 miles from the Amarillo, Texas, city limits.

Believe me: I had my doubts on the validity of a National Park called Palo Duro. But what in the world does Espanol call a giant canyon "Hard Stick"? All I had to do was look up the reason. "Hard Stick" is a reference to the proliferation of cedar and juniper trees and bushes inside the approximately 800-feet-deep wonder of nature. Native American tribes, including the infamous Comanche, used juniper and cedar sticks for their bows.

Why those? Because both bend. The hard sticks are also durable. What bends in the wind is best when it is strong. That's true gospel. Take a bow to the mighty bow and arrow.

There we were, the summer of 2010, my buddy and I, riding along the highway, both of us peering ahead. No canyon. Miles slid by us. Still no canyon. Then, what looked like a giant eye opening on the surface of the prairie--first a thickening along the horizon, then a broader line, still broader, until only when the car was almost on top of the National Park...a massive canyon.

No wonder the Comanche, most infamous and dangerous of prairie Native tribal "collectives", used Palo Duro as the perfect hideout. The US Cavalry searched for the Comanche's secret hidey-hole for nearly 22 years. No problem to the Comanche: They and the Kiowa, and Apache, a host of other tribes knew all about the why's and where's of what the ever-witty Apache had dubbed "Canyon In The Plains". Coronado first found the place. Then, in 1874, the US Army circled the canyon, established snipers all around the canyon's rim, and thus commenced what might have been known as "shooting ducks in a barrel".

Warriors, chiefs, women, mothers, fathers, and children--either slaughtered or shipped off to Oklahoma. 

Think of Palo Duro as the great big hole in a giant, distorted pan called Texas.  

Once my buddy and I managed a narrow road down the canyon's rim, once we found a suitable campsite a little distant from weekend revelers, I discovered I'd forgotten my tent. My buddy had his.  Thus we made the long excursion back up the hill, to the Park's visitor center, where I bought a pup tent.  Not too expensive.  

Silly me.  I didn't read the little words on the instruction manual very well: Tent secured in trunk, once removed from said trunk, I discovered my tent was a kiddie tent.  So much for this Pilgrim in the wild wilderness.  Similarities are likely between the two concepts are here pointed out in little words and the spaces (like Palo Duro) between all the little words.  

Context sometimes means "space".  Latitude.  

Nevertheless, I soldiered onward, set up the kiddie tent I would use as my shelter during an actually warm couple of nights.  Wasn't hot.  The temperature at the bottom of the canyon was like air conditioning.  

Catcalls from my buddy?  Heck yeah: 

"Dammit Bobby!"  

Indeed, I was Hank Hill's kid for the weekend.  I guess.  "King of the Hill", by the way, is a Texan's concept. Arlen, the cartoon town where the Hills and comrades live is an amalgam of two Dallas area suburbs: Arlington and Garland.  I still live in the latter.  I call my home "Land of the Gars".  Gars are predatory, near-reptilian fish with big teeth.  Provoke a Gar and you're in for a world of hurt.  

No big issue.  The bigger issue was the prairie dog town just across the winding dirt access road to the campsite.  As evening, I could see the gossip among the cute rodents: head's up, troopers, malingerers just outta town!  

And goodies.  

A worse, more pesky issue are the coyotes.  No, not the yip-yip-yippity-yip! battle cry of Nature's guerrilla warriors.  Nope.  Stealthily, quietly, while everyone is either sound asleep or strung out on beer, in they'd creep...up the smallish arroyo winding through the camp, the scent of unsecured meat, chips, and especially crackers irresistible to wild creatures instrumentalizing instinct in order to get some stuff.  

"What're we gonna do?" my buddy asked.  "They'll chew through the ice chest!" 

Already a "total veteran" of camping among coyotes, I showed my buddy.  I made a circular trip around the campground, small trickles of my urine sprinkling the ground.  Such an expert.  

"That's insane!  What he hell are you doing?"  My buddy almost tipped his lawn chair from laughing at me. 

"Marking our territory.  The coyotes'll respect that."

Sure enough, come darkness, as I lay there in that too-short King of the Hill tent, I relaxed--by listening to outraged campers up and down the arroyo, exclaiming loudly as the coyotes conducted guerrilla warfare upon the true intruders.  

Them dogs dun left us alone, buckos.  

Oh yeah.  A vacation from scavenging predators.  Coyotes are clever.  A far northern exurb of Dallas encountered an actual coyote attack: a jogger got bitten.  What many do not know is that coyotes watch humans closely.  If you'd been chased out of your ancestral homeland, what would you do?  Whatever, a coyote is known to befriend neighborhood dogs, and will garner trust, happily yipping, leaping and playing with the pet--and then SNAP!  The coyote makes a meal of the pet.  

But coyotes, having been chased out of their homeland by farming (culture conflict), appear even where I live.  One coldish January morning in 2017, I spotted one.  I could see tufts of white fur shivering in the wind across the street--between a creek bed and a dumpster behind a local fried chicken establishment.  

Saddening to see a factor in the Great Chain Of Being forced into dumpster diving.  

Back to Palo Duro, the "duck shoot", and the two city slickers out for a vacation in the wooly wilds of a National Park.  

Yeah, we did get dirty--from windblown dust evening winds kicked-up.  At twilight, meanwhile, lovely tallow trees danced like Comanche in the gusts.  Like a ghost wind.  I couldn't help but feel my heart swell. To think my buddy and I were camping on the sacred grounds of one of the worst Native American massacres in US history.  

Eek!  Dirty!  Germaphobes beware!  Then my buddy and my sporadic heckling: 

"Gotta watch out for them Al Qader up there's on that there rim, good buddy!"  

"AL QADER!!!"  

Yes, terrorism alerts are everywhere on the local news. 

The following Saturday, I large red van full of what I took to be area citizens pulled in next to the site we occupied.  Out came barbecues, fancy lawn chairs, kids a-mighty, and some relatively and already inebriated people.  

Up cranked the Tejano music, a traditional ethnic music based somewhat on the polka. In truth, Tejano is based in part on the actual polkas enjoyed by 19th and early 20th Century German and Czech immigrants.  The major part of course is in present-tense.  Tejano, in my opinion, is a lovely, melodic type of dance music.  

The campsite next door, I came to suspect, was enjoying a Memorial Day Woodstock only feet from where I sat.  Loud. Loud. Louder. Boom-boom-boom!!!

As my buddy and I sat there watching those people party and barbecue, we both knew a National Park ranger would show--and he did, politely, stride over and ask the family Memorial Day partiers to tone it down.  

"BUT THIS IS OUR LAND!  WE'RE DESCENDANTS OF THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED HERE!"  

Fair enough.  

Quite a fracas--at least until the badly-needed National Park ranger slid a ticket pad out and threatened to write.  

The family did turn down their raucous celebration.  No ICE was necessary.  After all, when people are civilized enough to be polite to others wonders ensue.  

Late that night, as my buddy and I watched a group of cute college women two sites away, after I'd slid my Echo and the Bunnymen cassette into my portable radio, there we were, enjoying a gander while listening to Eighties-era British New Wave.  

"What-chu listenin' to?" came a shout.  

"ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN!!!!" 

"Cool!  Turn it up!"  

I still wonder what the prairie dogs thought about our musical offering to the stars, the canyon, the Comanche dead, and of course the coyotes. 

In only a few days, Thanksgiving will begin--with or without restrictions on citizen liberty.  Liberty, at its most natural, involves the natural right to move wherever one chooses to move.  Freedom is the frame surrounding a person's ability to make good on that natural and self-evident right that has been here much longer than "the restrictors" have been around, some of them slappin' limp-leather-covered Bibles and "gospel mongering." 

Down the street at times, I'll spot one or two pot slingers. Maybe that's why that big hole in the Giant Pan that is Texas ought to come to mind. 

Freedom this!  Freedom that!  But ain't it sad you can't get on a plane and celebrate your gratitude with your family? 

Like any old hillbilly or goat roper, the anti-freedom restrictors holler:  

BUT YOU BUGGERS AIN'T OBEYIN' ME'N GIVIN' ME MUH PROPS!!!" 

*snore*

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