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Events occur, but “great men” determine the outcome.Kenneth Clarke compared the founders of the Florentine Renassance with the founders of our nation in that they were rare confluences of great men.The French Revolution is an example of how after the death of Mirabeau Robespierre altered the direction to the Reign of Terror and then a greater Napoleon swerved it in another direction.Imagine if Lincoln had been a Buchanan (“Oh for an hour of Andrew Jackson”), if TR had been President 1912-1916 instead of the vastly overrated Wilson and might have mediated a postponement of WWI.The bolshevik revolution could only take place after the “First” revolution in 1917 produced a weak, naive Kerensky paving the way for giants such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.Today, we seem to be floundering in the USA awaiting a great man as a counterweight to that self-appointed false Messiah who offered “hope and change” and seems bent on deconstructing the USA.It is not an either or situation. Events also thrust non-entities into the arena, and they can also become great. Harry Truman is one. Imagine if that lefty Henry Wallace had succeeded FDR, which leads me to include in this skeptical age a “wild card” we may well call Divine Providence.
First, I want to say that was born and raised inside San Francisco, and we were hip to gays by junior high. In high school, the athletes used to go to North Beach and, as they put, it to “roll queers.” As soon as some of us reached the age of 21, we looked forward to taking our dates to the major female impersonator shows, especially Finnocchio's — and not tell them what they were seeing to surprise them. At Cal, if one asked, “Are you a Psychology major?” it was an inquiry to learn if you were gay.I say all this as background to what I witnessed when I served in the Army as a draftee for two years August 1954-56. At that time, everyone made jokes about avoiding guys who played “drop the soap.” One draftee during our first 8 week cycle of BT at Ft. Ord let it be know he would do anything to get out. He deliberately dropped the soap on a tough sergeant who first beath the crap out of them, then wrote him up. He got what he wanted and received a Section 8 discharge.During my 2nd BT cycle at Ft. Lee, the NCOs had private rooms on the same floor as our 40-man cots. Each morning a not-too-swift country boy came out of the cook's room. No one bothered him for being gay.During my 18 month TOD in Kaiserslautern Germany, I saw no evidence of gay behavior and activities among the men I served with, but more than a few times the they would comment about many of the WACs who did not hide their “bulldyke” behavior. They looked so tough, some of the GIs said they would never want to get into a fight with them. We did suspect one lieutenant because he said more than once he loved the smell of sweat in a gym.To summarize on topic my two years in the Army, at no time did I witness any violence against gays, nor did I see any gay “flamer” behavior. Of course in those days, nearly all would have been “in the closet.”
At first sight I fell in love with the Spitfire. I later liked the Mustang and the Yak-5 (or 3) designs.
Open heart surgery? But they did not know how to close? :DBy the way feel free to use my line when you are approached by fools in a bar. Tell them you are an Aztec Cardiologist and watch their expressions. More than once, the response to me was: Yourrrrrrre a doctor?”
That day, I was a 13 year old at Capitola, a beach resort we went to each summer 5 miles south of Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay.Sirens sounded, and some local beach type greaseburger palaces passed out free hot dogs for the day.
You even have a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2209052640&topic=17251&perpage=30&post_index=31&start=7&post_id=138673 [/quote}Amusing and interesting comments, but the autistic and the “idiot” savants are different from collective temper tantrums against conservative speakers and clubs, ROTC, military recruiting, opinions in school papers, and anything else that diverges from leftist dogma. It is a legacy of the Viet Nam war era. When I was at U.C. Berkely, 1949-54, the only signs of emotional moronics excluding rooting sections of course, were disputes between Stalinists and Trotskyites, the only collective violence panty raids.
I love that line, I will probably plagiarize it on my blog, if you will let me. It could be used to describe many liberals, not just those at Ivy league schools.
Be my guest — ;D
An undocumented suspicion — do you think there is something rotten in the hiring and student selection processes at Harvard and other ivies?They used to have quotas vs. Jews, and if memory serves, the school was as sympathetic to Hitler in the 30s as the ives are today to Ahminidjad and hostile to conservatives.Elite schools, hmmmm? High IQs, emotional morons.
When it became a commonwealth, too lazy to look up the dates, but WWII finished her off and the independence of the colonies commenced. Before the war, their pound was worth $4.80 US.During the war, we had plenty of propaganda in school about another goal aside from defeating the Axis nations — it was decided that we should learn it would be a good thing if the Brits, French, Dutch and Belgians allowed their colonies and mandates to be independent as happened over the decade or two after the war.
