The Only Thing We Have To Fear

Later this month, Christmas Eve will find me awaiting the annual Holiday for the 90th time and I can compare this one with only one other: Christmas 1941.  Both days find the citizens of America facing a threatened future under siege from a devastating enemy attack; one by powerful allied military armies and the other by microscopic organisms that, while unseen, prove to be equally as deadly.

Seventeen days before Christmas 1941, Japanese aircraft made their tactical attack on Pearl Harbor causing awful damage to American warships and military installations. While it was a shocking blow to an unprepared nation, key facts of the raid would prove critical to the final success of the American response.  The battleships damaged in the raid were not the aircraft carriers that would make the difference in coming sea battles with Japanese forces.  Also, the Japanese raiders failed to destroy the storage farms of petroleum fuel.

While the attack was greeted with wide celebrations in Japan, naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto had a more prescient assessment of the attack: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve," he wrote.  He was right.  America rose up under the masterful leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He organized the massive mobilization of the nation's industrial power while communicating with the souls of individual citizens. I remember sitting around our radio, Mama and Daddy and my two sisters,  listening to the calm voice (I can still hear his tone) of the President focusing our attention to the mission that would lead us to victory. He united the nation as it had never been before.  And never has been since.

What a difference in America today.  We find the gifts under the tree to be sour apples and spoiled dreams with over a quarter million of our fellow citizens dead from the silent enemy.  Other millions of children without food to eat. The economy in free fall. After the original attack there was no calm voice of a leader to unite us in a massive counter-attack with organizing plans and challenges to individual citizen warriors. We do have a lot to fear.

I still have the official card that identifies me as an air watch volunteer (Mama and me during a four hour shift once a week) to identify (we went to silhouette classes) any Japanese bombers we feared were coming in those early war months.  None of their aircraft got through on our watch.

I'll take Christmas 1941 over this one.  There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see.

                                                           

Update to September Skin Report

Since I posted that skin story last September, yesterday I had a visit with my dermatologist and learned some additional information.  So this update.

One thing the almost 350 million people who voted in the last election (even those in cemeteries) would be in full agreement on is the importance of personal hygiene. The guy in the elevator who didn't think that was important gets dagger looks from his fellow lifters.  Americans spend billions of dollars every year on soaps and cleansing lotion, paying tribute to the quest for an immaculate persona and the eradication of unpleasant odors.

It is said that Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, while celebrated for his erudition, avoided bathing for long periods of time. Seated in an eating establishment one evening, a lady at the next table addressed him saying, "Sir, you smell." "No, Madam," he replied, "you smell, I stink."

My grand niece, Drew Saylor, who is a dermatologist, agees that soap should be confined to breakfast dishes and underwear but not skin.  She tells us soap washes away beneficial oils and microbiome produced by the body.  Eliminate soap and at a minimum you avoid dry skin and, she thinks, there's a whole world beyond that. 

 Amazon will send you three bars of Cetaphil non-soap cleanser for $9.00,  Imagine this: after 90 years I end up shilling for Big Pharma.

NFL Observation

Sunday night football, November 22, 2020.  LA Raiders vs Kansas City Chiefs.  Sideline shot of Raider's coach Jon Gruden wearing required face mask, speaking on his phone, holding play-calling sheet in front of mask so opponent spys can't read his lips.  NFL always entertaining.

Palouse Perils

 I watched my Oregon Ducks play the Washington State Cougars in Pullman last Saturday.  The minute the game came on I rose from my couch and went to put on a sweater.  Memories of Pullman, Washington in November lowered my body temperature by 10 degrees.  Pullman is in the Palouse, a unique geographical area of rolling hills like giant sand dunes that welcome icy blasts of weather from the polar regions that my Aunt Helen, who knew that country, described as having nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence with the top strand down.

Sending young scholars to play football in Pullman in November could be classified as a crime against humanity.  Extreme cold causes materials (including live creatures) to contract and become brittle.  Engagement in any activity that involves violent collisions will make a person feel as if they are in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where shattered parts of your body are flying all around.

In the first half the Oregon team fell behind by two touchdowns and a field goal.  Shattered pieces of players were everywhere on the frozen tundra.  The Coug players were unaffected by the temperature because their trainers stick a long needle into their brains and turn off the hot/cold switch.  As the game went on the Oregon players became numb to the alien environment and fought back to win the game by a couple of touches.  As Oregon QB Tyler Shough took a knee to end the game, all he could think about, along with his teammates, was that locker room with those skin-ripping hot showers.  Who needs soap?

I suspect two years from now it will be difficult to get players from that game, still on the team, to willingly board the chartered aircraft headed for the Palouse.        

Give 'em Hell, Harry

In five days voting citizens of the United States of America will decide whether incumbent President Donald John Trump will be given another four year term or whether he will be replaced by Joseph Robinette (would you name your kid Robinette?) Biden, Jr.  The high anxiety result of next Tuesday's vote took me back to Monday, November 1, 1948, where I sat in the  classroom of history Professor Daniel L. Gadke.  Professor Gadke was a longtime iconic teacher at Willamette University known for his deeply conservative political beliefs and his love of rhododendrons.  The Willamette campus today is richly adorned with the magnificent rhododendrons he had planted over his years at the University.

Common knowledge of the race between Democratic President Harry S Truman (the "S" was his name, not an initial) was considered all but over with Republican challenger Thomas L. Dewey's wife having already chosen the new drapes for the Oval Office. After the cabal of close advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the bum's rush to his vice president for being too far left in his politics, the little (5'8") senator from Missouri, Harry Truman was chosen to run with Roosevelt in 1944.  Roosevelt had small regard for Truman and they rarely met together right up to Roosevelt's death in 1945

There was something about Dewey that was a bit off-putting. He was too slickly perfect (some newspaper critic once said he looked like the splendid little guy you put on top of your wedding cake. The zinger stuck). Harry focused his campaign on the Republican do-nothing congress and took his "Give 'em Hell" rant on a train ride across America.  He addressed his fellow citizens from the rear platform of the train's last car.

As class ended that November Monday, an almost-giddy Professor Gadke announced to our class, "When we meet again on Wednesday we will be blessed with a new Republican administration." 

Forty-eight hours later a thousand rhododendrons lost their leaves.    

Penalty: Delay of game

I've shuffled my life's problems into two separate packages: those I can make some effort, however feeble, to control and those I can identify but not influence.  The latter include global environmental regulations that are necessary to make human life on our planet sustainable, the behavior of political officials to act responsibly for the best interests of their constituency,  and making the trains and buses of Portland's Tri-Met operations run on time. 

The former category includes maintenance of my mental and physical health, the nurturing of my relationship with friends and relatives and the pursuit of satisfying activities to fill hours not spent sleeping.  Television and reading are active players  in this last life-plan.

I just just turned off the lights and left the stadium seat in my living room where I was watching a football game. It was mid-way through the 3rd quarter with the LA Rams 9 -- SF 49ers 21.  I declare the season over.  Advertising fatigue wins.  I get it. The Covid-19 virus has shut down live fan viewing in the nation's NFL stadiums with a consequent loss of millions in ticket sales so to support the operation TV advertising has to carry the load. Sorry, coach, I can't play this game.

Rams run three plays, don't make ten yards, punt.  Here come the commercials, one after another. Back to live action. Niners make a first down, then run three plays and punt. The commercial train is back. Rams run two series, punt. Car ads. Pills for joint pain. Cute kids throwing food around. On and on.

I can't do it.  There is no game flow.  Just a tsunami of repeating commercials that have nothing to do with entertainment.  Hello, Netflix.

Hey, Joe and Kamala, after you solve global warming, dead economy, racial strife and the Covid 19 epidemic,  let those people in America who have enough money left to buy a ticket find their seats in a stadium so TV can look in with their advertising share of the action adjusted back to normal. And find some way to outlaw teams using the prevent defense.

Who Said That?

 Who doesn't admire a line of words that stick in your mind and magically recreate a dramatic scene or sequence of scenes that never get out of date?  Secure in a timeless vault in your mind.  This came to me when I saw Jaws on Turner Classic Movies and, of course, that classic line, "You're going to need a bigger boat."  I did some research on how the line got into the movie and turned up a delightful vignette. 

Stephen Spielberg was a little known director when he took on the troubled production of the movie jaws in 1974. It was his third movie as a director.  The producers rented a huge barge to hold all the camera gear and props used in the filming that was all on water (the crew named the barge SS Garbage Sale). The cost-cutting producers hired a small boat to push the barge around and it was inadequate for the job.  Everyone picked up the phrase, "You're going to need a bigger boat." and it was used on the set when anything went wrong from breakdown of equipment to late food delivery.

In the movie after the first sighting of the shark, the Brody character ad-libbed the crew's line, "You're going to need a bigger boat" and they kept the line in the movie.

Other great lines came to mind. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn " was Clark Gable's Rhett Butler's reply to his manipulative wife, Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara's pleading, "What's to become of me?" in the 1939 movie, Gone With The Wind.  The curse word, "damn" in a movie shocked the nation but became a movie classic.

Whose heart doesn't beat a little faster upon hearing Humphrey Bogart say to the gorgeous Lauren Bacall in the 1943 Casablanca, "Here's looking at you, kid?"

Listen to Don Vito Corleone in the 1972 movie, The Godfather: "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."

Bette Davis in 1950's All About Eve: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."  

There are so many more from wonderful flicks: Dr. Strangelove. Taxi Driver. Wizard of Oz. On The Waterfront.  Sunset Boulevard.                                      Name your favorites.