Confederates in the Mist

I grew up a rebel in Richmond, Virginia. Yankees were bad. The government had come down in 1861 and destroyed the South. The Cause. Only The Cause existed. Dragged off to Gone with the Wind by Great Grand Parents who lived in old Civil War Brown stones I had no idea that the War Between the States had ended. More it was a smoldering fuse ready to be re-lit any time. The South Shall Rise Again was not said with an ounce of disenguousness. We were Southerners and we distrusted anyone who was not a Southerner.

My grandfather on my mothers side used to say a Yankee moved in next door. He is not a bad fellow. Meaning that he can not help that he is from the North. Martin Luther King was that King fellow who had come down to stir up trouble. Stir up the Negroes. When my father and I went for ice cream an enormous fat man said he was closing the store before the niggers started burning. This was the day after King was assassinated.

And so I grew up reading Gone with the Wind every summer and I saw myself as a twelve year old Rhett Butler. We eventually moved North but I never forgot that my allegiance lay to the South and The Cause. It had nothing to with slavery. It was that our world was apart from the world of the North and that it was no longer here.

So when I hear about the Gun Folks talking about Revolution and 1776 and a Second Civil War, I have to say I feel like an old General listening to some new privates.It is in my DNA to distrust the government. I never saw myself as part of this world. Many Southerners still hold this view. And when I go back to Richmond and march around that weary old hot capitol you can still feel that old society. But you know The South lost that Civil War and will never rise again. The world is a very complex place and The Cause is as dead as 1861 and  talk of Civil War or Revolution is just foolish.

Romanticism for any cause is the desperate conviction that there is a better world out there somewhere in the mist. Really there is only this world. The Gun Folks should take heed and deal with the issues before us. There will be no second Civil War and no Second Revolution. The Cause is as dead as a door nail.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

When the Revolution Begins...

A doctor I know said he is going to buy the Bushmaster faux AR15. He said that he is buying it for when the revolution begins. When I pressed him for further details he said that the revolution could begin anytime. I asked who would be behind the revolution. He didn't answer and didn't say anything more, but I have heard this many times. We are stockpiling for when the revolution begins. We are getting ready for the revolution. The three hundred increase in firearm purchases since Obama became President is surely in preparation for when the revolution begins.

And there is nothing more you can say. The revolution. This is a word batted around in the hinterlands of America to describe the takeover of the US by Obamian forces composted of blacks, gays, Muslims, urbanites, liberals, the UN, Obamacare enthusiasts, atheists, just about anyone who is not white and probably rural. The when the revolution begins folks are arming for a vague Armageddon where blood will flow in he streets and the screaming forty seven percent will come for their due.

And what else was Romneys famous forty seven percent speech but a clarion call against the revolutionaries who are sucking away the lifeblood of  America. His singling out of half the population and  clearly drawing a line in the sand against the menacing hoards who can not be reformed into the American mainstream. Only the real Americans deserve to be represented and the rest need be to watched...preferably with a Bushmaster.

And this is the great paranoia behind the gun debate. The people who see their guns as being ready for the Obamian rabble who will come and take all they have worked for. Or even a military uprising where gun toting Americans will have to defend home and hearth against an evil Socializing Big Brother government. And so the good doctor will get his gun. He can certainly afford the twenty five hundred dollars. And he will be ready.

When the revolution begins....

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Occupy Chicago's rag tag band in the rain

Rain is hard in Chicago. It is a brooding dark city in the South loop anyway and when it rains in October and the people have gone away then you really feel that old Nelson Algren metropolis that seems so much like Gotham. Maybe it's because Chicago is a northern city that has to get through the long winters. But South Loop has always been strange and deserted at night and Lasalle Street is even more deserted with the closed up CBOT and the giant pillars of the Federal Reserve. And then in all that rain and dreariness is a small group of people with soggy signs and plastic slickers. They stand there on one corner looking like homeless people: Occupy Chicago.

You can't beat them up too much. Protesting in the modern age like everything else is derivative. I remember the huge parade of people going down Michigan Avenue when the Iraq war broke out. The first one. A lone black man said to me we goin to war. And then they marched down Congress and that was a large protest, but they too were swallowed up by indifference. The war happened anyway. What is interesting is that the Occupy movement is pretty small or so it seems and they are getting media coverage. But this too is on a time limit.

My buddy and I huddled in the CBOT doorway out of the rain and watched the protester's. One woman held up a sign: WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT. A few people honked as they went by. The rain came down even harder. The rest of the protester's talked as if at a really bad concert waiting for the next band. Somebody hit a giant drum. But other than that there was just the marble edifices of modern finance and the small motley crew of people. A cop pulled up and sat in his car, staring at the ad hoc tent of plastic someone had set up over boxes. Hooverville of the Depression comes to mind.

And then there was really not much to do. We were in the middle of the night in the middle of  a rainstorm watching people get soaked with a few soggy signs. No change it would seem here. It was almost embarrassing to watch. Maybe all movements start like this but television certainly glamorizes because this was just small and dismal. So we moved on and found a bar.

It was a yuppie bar on Michigan Avenue with a strange feel of 1985 for yuppies. But no one had told these people the party was over. Men in suits and women in designer dresses. Martinis all around. A wealthy man with long grey hair just down the bar. We order up and sit among the if not one percent then certainly the up and coming ten percent. Who knows. We were a long way from that ragged band of soaked people on a street corner.

So it is with all revolutions.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Battle of Britain

Like the World War that we wanted to keep across the ocean the last Battle of Britain headed our way and Charles Lindbergh and the rest of America First could do little to keep their troubles away from our shores while a few people like Edward R Murrow broadcast the carnage to let Americans know that they could not hide from this horrific event and that unless we did something it would end up in our laps. FDR knew The Battle of Britain was our problem and he threw everything he could at them until the Japanese bailed him out with Pearl Harbor.

Such is the history lesson we now confront. Watch those rioters in London. Watch those fires burn and you see the beginning of something people do not want to think about. It is a breakdown of society. Think Arab Spring. Think the fall of the Soviet Union. Great nations do fall and it is usually because the will of the people was subverted by forces bent on looting and taking power for themselves at the plight of the many. We hold these truths to be self evident: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So says our founding fathers but for our middle class these truths now ring hollow.

They certainly ring hollow for the great swath of people in Britain marginalized by an economy and austerity measures. If people have nothing to lose then they will riot and burn and pillage and steal and even murder. We have seen it before, but because of the strange duality of hard economic times coupled with governments going into austerity mode we now see gasoline thrown on an already burning fire. It is to our detriment that we are heading down austerity road with the Republicans and The Tea Party who believe pain is our only salvation. That pain is burning down buildings in London right now.

The middle class are not children and our leaders are not school masters. They were right there with us spending the money. But they have become the drunk who drinks all the booze and then tells everyone it's terrible how much they drink. The Battle of Britain is raging now. It is across the ocean and like the last World War it seems distant and not our affair. But we better wake up before another December 7th jolts us out of our complacency. Or those burning buildings will be our own.

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Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning