Just Don't Add Up

(Edited from a comment I made in a thread on Facebook.)

There's a lot of hysteria and paranoia about Obama and how he plans to destroy America, kill many Americans and make slaves of the rest. I'm at a loss to explain it, unless it's a holdover from the Cold War and mutually assured destruction.

Obama's aim to disarm citizens has been an ongoing topic among his Internet critics In a recent thread on Facebook, the discussion centered on Internet rumors that the Secret Service would be empowered to confiscate guns from American citizens. Someone mentioned Obama's past comment about creating a civilian security force, and wondered how that would figure into gun confiscation.

I noted that he said that (about a civilian security force) in 2008 as a candidate. Hasn't mentioned it again since.

One thing has mystified me about the dire speculation following the election, Benghazi, and Sandy Hook. What's missing in all the talk of armored vehicles, FEMA coffins and billions of rounds of ammo for DHS is ... who's gonna fire them? This is the one element that has been missing since the beginning of the speculation -- enough people (enough of the right kind of people -- trained and ruthless).

First, it was the US military ... but evidently, Obama found out he can't count on them, even with all the firings and removals of top brass, so the military sort of faded from the speculation talk. So then it was UN troops. The problem with that is that WE are the UN, for all intents and purposes. If our troops won't do his bidding as the American military, they're not going to do it as members of a UN coalition. Our friends in the UN (Europe, Canada, Oz, etc) will not do it. Basically, that leaves (1) Islam and (2) the third world. Are Muslims going to take orders from an American president, regardless of how friendly he is to Islam? And who really thinks third worlders like Somalis can enforce gun confiscation here?

Forget the UN.

So then it was Interpol. And Interpol's charter/constitution forbids such actions. My understanding from online info is that they aren't law enforcement agents, per se, anyway. They're a liaison between law enforcement authorities in different countries that need to work together on international criminal cases.

Then it was FEMA kids (all 231 of them). So now it's the Secret Service. Sounds like he's scraping the bottom of the barrel. It'll be interesting to see who will be put forth next as Obama's enforcers.

Wikipedia says there were 1,429,995 people on active duty in the armed forces as of Jan 31, 2013. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 2,204,800 million civilians work for the Federal Government. Not all of those work in enforcement agencies; and not everyone employed by an enforcement agency is an enforcement agent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, State and local law enforcement agencies employed about 1,133,000 persons on a full-time basis in 2008, including 765,000 sworn personnel.

So if you take the entire federal workforce many of whom are not enforcement personnel, and the entire US military and the entire state and local law enforcement employees, you have approximately five million (5,137,800) people.

The population of the United States is 313,914,040. That's 313 million as of July 2012. About 70 to 80 million of them are gun owners holding about 300 million firearms.

If the military, federal employees and state and local cops ALL turned into Obama enforcers (which of course isn't going to happen) and attempted gun confiscation precipitated civil war, you'd have 5 million of them opposed to 70 or 80 million civilian gun owners with 300 million guns and who knows how many bullets...

I dunno, folks. Seems to me it's not civilian gun owners who need to be skeered.

(Note, Internet statistics are woefully unreliable; as are my math skills. But even accounting for that, the situation just doesn't seem as dire as people's paranoia would indicate.)

Sweet Southern Boys On Hunting....

Chapter One

Verona, Georgia
September 1985

Wesley Bratcher carried his lunch tray in a hard grip. He walked the center aisle of the noisy cafeteria looking left and right for his sister, Tiffany. Her hair was bright copper, like his, and usually made her easy to spot in a crowd, but not today. Abandoning his search for her, he looked for an empty seat anywhere.

It was the third of September, the first day of school and Wesley's first day as a fourth-grader at Cloverdale Elementary School. Except for his sister, he didn't know a single person here.

He found an empty seat and set his tray down. Three boys about his age were sitting opposite him, talking and laughing. They had brought their lunches from home and their side of the table was a trash heap of paper bags, food wrap, bread crusts and throw-away plastic.

Wesley's progressive parents impressed upon him the importance of respecting the environment and he always noticed when that respect was violated. These three had evidently been raised with no environmental consciousness.

In appearance, they were as different as noon, sunset and midnight, but they all spoke with the Southern hick accent that irritated Wesley to no end. They compounded his irritation by making spontaneous use of baffling regional idioms that tried his patience every time he heard them.

They paid no attention to him when he first sat down. It was rude and it proved that southern hospitality, which he'd heard so much about, was nothing but a crock. After a while, they noticed him and started talking to him, and that annoyed him, too.

The one in the middle had done most of the talking. He was the first to speak to Wesley.

"Hi, you're new, aren't ya? What's your name?" Collar-length brown hair framed his face, which was almost pretty enough to be a girl's.

Sissy.

The assessment was sullen and gratuitous because, except for his face, there was nothing girlish about him.

"Wesley Bratcher. I'm from Chicago." His midwestern accent marked him as an outsider, and he felt a jolt of pride from it.

"My name's John Mark. What grade are you in?"

"Fourth."

"We are, too."

The black-haired boy on John Mark's left looked at Wesley with benign curiosity.

"I'm Randy Stevenson," he said. "Do you play any sports? We play baseball and basketball and football."

Randy's eyes were dark and there was something odd about them Wesley couldn't pinpoint. His face wore a sort of neutral friendliness but the eyes gave Wesley the creeps.

"I skateboard."

"Hey! I do, too!" John Mark said. "Do you know where the skate park is here? It's Skatescape on Powell Avenue. I can tell you how to get there. But it's real small and pretty crappy compared to the ones in Atlanta or Jacksonville or Tampa. 'Course, you can street skate nearly anywhere. I do a lot of that. Do you do any tricks? Right now I'm learnin' all the stuff you can do with a trick called the ollie kickflip. Man, is it cool!"

During the chatter, the boy with blonde hair directly across from Wesley stopped sipping milk through a straw and set the carton down. He cut his blue-gray eyes sharply toward John Mark and showed his teeth in an impish grin. "Jabber, jabber."

John Mark aimed a thumb to the right and told Wesley, "This is Shelby. He don't have manners sometimes."

Shelby slid his eyes -- they were striking but not creepy, like Randy's -- to the newcomer. "Wock here's awesome. Been skatin' since he was six. He'll be state champion someday."

Introductions accomplished, the three boys took up their original conversation where it had left off and Wesley resumed eating in silence.

The Bratchers had moved to Georgia a month earlier. Wesley hated Verona from the moment they arrived. He'd learned nothing during his first morning at his new school to change that.

His table companions behaved like they had been friends a long time. Wesley had friends like that back home and he missed them terribly. He wondered if he would ever find friends among these Georgians--or whether he'd want to.

For about the millionth time since moving here, he was struck by the sheer foreignness of this place and these people. Assailed by a fresh wave of homesickness, he tuned out the talk across the table until something Shelby said caught his attention.

"....and Daddy wants to buy membership in a huntin' lodge in Early County. It's just across the river from the nuculer power plant in Alabama. He said everybody wants to hunt there 'cause you can't miss when you shoot--the deer glow in the dark!"

Shelby cackled and John Mark laughed like a chipmunk, the glint from his braces matching the twinkling in his eyes. But Randy didn't crack a smile. He tilted his head dubiously and said, "It's against the law to hunt deer at night."

Shelby gave him a pointed look. "It's a joke, Mister Spock."

"It's a dumb joke 'cause you can't hunt deer at night," Randy insisted.

Joke or not, Wesley was appalled. "You shoot deer? Like, with a gun?"

"Well, you can't bring 'em down with spitballs," Shelby said. "My daddy got me a Remington model seven Bambi-buster for my birthday. Had to get a used one, but it's a sweet rifle and I can't wait to try it. Deer season starts next month."

Wesley's incredulous gaze fastened on Shelby. "My parents say hunting is barbaric. How can you hunt deer? They don't hurt anything."

Shelby rolled his eyes and didn't answer but John Mark piped up, "Look, think of deer like they're big rats on stilts. They don't have no natural enemies. If people don't kill 'em, they'll multiply into a plague. They'll eat up all the crops and come up in your yard and eat it, and you'll run over 'em on the highway."

Still horrified by the idea of shooting animals, Wesley looked from one to the other of them and asked, "Do all of you guys hunt?"

"Yep." John Mark gave him an an emphatic nod. "But just varmints until this year."

Wesley frowned in incomprehension.

Randy explained. "Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, little critters like that."

"Oh." Wesley looked down at his plate, his appetite gone. The talk of shooting animals had given him a touch of nausea.

Shelby stuffed his lunch clutter into a paper bag and stood up. "Well. Welcome to Cloverdale Element'ry, yank."

 ________________

Images: Remington Arms Company; U.S. Government; Bacalao via Fotolia.com

Sexy Snippets from Southern Man ...

... for a certain critic, who evidently thinks pop-culture sex is a-okay unless is appears in a romance novel and depicts the intimacy of  a man a woman committed to each other through marriage for life....  Then, it tends to be trashy ....

What do you think?  Is this snippet trashy?

(Excerpt edited for length and clarity.)

Patty poured bubble bath into the oversized tub and turned the shiny chrome handles....She piled her hair on top of her head and fastened it with a barrette. Without haste, she undressed, stepped into the tub and carefully eased down into the hot water. She had been there several minutes, enjoying the music and waiting, when she heard her husband enter the bedroom.

“Tro,” she called.

“What?” He stood just inside the door and looked down at her. Only her head and shoulders showed above the froth.

“Get in.” She tilted her head to give him an inviting smile. 

“You shameless hussy.”

“It’ll make you feel good.”

He shook his head. “Real men don’t take bubble baths.”

But one side of his mouth quirked up as he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it from his trousers. The half-smile changed to a mock leer and in moments he was naked, his clothes tossed carelessly onto the hamper. He stepped into the tub, grimaced at the temperature of the water and sat down gingerly, pulling air through his teeth.

“Turn around and I’ll rub your shoulders,” she said.

“I won’t argue with that. This water’s hot.”

“It only takes a minute to get used to it, wuss.” She squeezed water from a bath sponge across his neck and shoulders, kneaded them gently and listened to his not entirely put-on moans and groans....

Patty leaned back against the slanted wall of the tub, pulled him against her and crossed her arms around his neck. Troy grasped her feet and stroked her insteps with his thumbs. They lay there in silence, eyes closed, as the last of the day’s tension from fussing children, radical feminists and plummeting sales dissipated seemingly into the water.

After a while, he rolled over toward her, making their diminishing blanket of bubbles rock and slosh. She studied his face—the dark eyes, the exquisitely shaped lips, now slightly parted, the fine coating of sweat. Her steadfast love for him began to stir into ardor.

You beautiful, sloe-eyed man! It’s a miracle that you love me and belong to me!

He studied her face, too, and murmured, “You’re so sweet and you look so cute covered with bubbles and your hair done up like that. I wish I could stay with you all night—we could have so much fun together—but I have to go.”

She blinked. “Go? Why?”

“I promised my wife I’d be home by ten-thirty. If I’m not, she’ll pitch a hissy-fit.”

“The bitch,” Patty said caustically, her brows lowering. “You are completely henpecked.”

She filliped the water, sending a small splash toward him. He jerked his head to the side but not quickly enough. With drops rolling down his face, he flashed her a menacing grin.

“Oh, you bad girl, you have done it now,” he said, giving each word exaggerated enunciation. “You better watch it ’cause you never know when I’m gonna get you for that.”

She put the tip of her forefinger in her mouth for a moment and said, “You won’t, though.”

“Prob’ly not. But I ought to. Think how pissed you’d be if I’d done that to you.”

“Yes, but you know I would mind, and I know you don’t.”

As she looked at him, the desire building inside her fountained upward to show in her face and glow in her eyes. She didn’t try to conceal it, but took his face in her hands and pulled him closer to kiss him.

She kept it going a long time. He stirred but made no move away from her, no attempt to break the seal of their lips. At last, she did, and tilted her head back enough to see his face, to lose herself in the sweetness of his expression and in the beginning of passion and desire her kiss had put in his eyes.

He blinked and inhaled, as if breaking out of a mild trance, and slid forward to follow up with a kiss of his own. He murmured against her mouth, “Darlin’ darlin’ baby ... I’m gettin’ in the shower.”

Troy believed tubs were for relaxing in and showers were for getting clean. Patty watched him step out and walk through the doorway to his bathroom. Naked or clothed, he was magnificent, exquisitely proportioned, like Michelangelo’s David, like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, except for the slight extra length to his legs, which enhanced rather than detracted from his perfection....

Patty finished bathing and flipped the drain lever. She wrapped herself in her terry robe... In her bathroom, she got ready for bed. Passing over her usual nightwear, tailored tricot pajamas, she shimmied into a short, slinky white negligee, because Troy was needful tonight and she was wantful. And because it was the last thing a bitchy, hissy-pitching wife would wear.

She put a dab of Parthenope into the hollow at the base of her throat, removed the barrette and let her brown locks fall uncombed to her shoulders.

In the cool, dim bedroom, she checked to see that Troy had shut the door to the hallway. The children knew not to come into their parents' bedroom when the door was closed unless it was an emergency, and to knock first in any case.

Troy emerged from his bathroom, dried off but slightly damp and naked but for the towel around his waist because naked was how he slept. He kept a pair of pajama bottoms under the mattress for quick access on the nights when storms or bad dreams brought the little ones scurrying to sleep with Mama and Daddy.

Patty stepped up to him and gave him a petulant look. “You said you’d be home by ten-thirty. Where were you? Who is she?”

He shook his head, grinning. “You’re not a very convincing harridan, sweetheart. You just don’t have it in you.”

Their little game had been fun, but his smile faded and the look on his face said he was ready to get back to reality. A sultry flame leaped to life in his eyes as they went down her body and moved back up to her face. With a forefinger, he pushed aside the thin strap of her negligee, trailed his lips along her shoulder and nuzzled her neck.

Patty shivered and broke out in goose pimples.

She gave the towel a tug and it fell to the floor.

Troy put his arms around her, pulled her to him and kissed her. He took a soft, uneven breath and murmured, “She’s you. You’re all the women I want—my sweet wife, my children’s mother, my helper, naughty girl, best friend .... and I love every one of y’all to death.”

Baseball Season Starts Soon

I'm not much of a fan, but I know that much....

Question...

 If you want to see the role erotica plays in grinding down America, watch this the movie, AGENDA: Grinding America Down, here: http://vimeo.com/52009124

Free to view for a limited time, and worth it -- IF you care about the survival of your culture, your country and the families that form their foundation.

___________________________

Image by C. Garbiano via StockXchange.

Trashy Novels? Installment Two

Certainly Connie doesn’t [celebrate African Americans' struggle for freedom and equality] as her all-white cast of heroes and heroines in her own “books” demonstrates.

Observing the color of the cast of characters in Connie’s writing ... is just that: an observation. ... However, it is a bit of a stretch to say one is writing “pro-southern” literature if the South one imagines lacks people of color.

Apparently segregation (or outright exclusion) reigns supreme in her fictional world, too....

Brooks D. Simpson

Professor of History

Arizona State University

on Crossroads, his personal blog

Notice how he goes from "all-white cast of heroes and heroines" in my books (which is an accurate restatement of my description, "all the heroes in my novels are Southern white men, and all the heroines are Southern white women) to "the color of the cast of characters in Connie's writing..." that is, all the characters in all my writing.

He makes these judgments, as I've noted before, without having read my novels. If he had read them, or read one of them, he would know about this scene.  Of course, that knowledge would be no guarantee that he wouldn't ignore it ... or lie about it.

______________________________________

Excerpt (edited for spoilers) 

 Sweet Southern Boys

A layer of diaphanous clouds lightened the blue spring sky when Randy halted his motorcycle in a parking lot of the Cloverdale Community Recreation Center. To his right lay two baseball diamonds, vacant now, but soon they'd be churning with activity. Only a few vehicles took up parking spaces here and there.  Whoever had driven them was nowhere to be seen.

 Randy sat astride his motorcycle to wait and a bittersweet nostalgia overtook him.  So many memories of his life were centered on this place.  Here he had cemented his friendship with Shelby and John Mark playing basketball, baseball, and the occasional round of tennis. Here he had volunteered with the youth leagues, sometimes assisting the teams  his father coached.

Here, when he was eight, he had been stalked by the crazy woman who had accused his father of sexual harassment.  Brooke Emerson.  He remembered her clearly. Tall, a bit thin, with fine hair, the palest blond he'd ever seen.  She would come to him after his Saturday games, lean on the low chain link fence that separated them and say, "Hi, Randy."

"Hi," he'd say back to her, barely audibly.  And then, deeply disturbed for some reason, he would scurry away to find Miss Gina, his ride home.

It was right after Randy told his father about her coming to his ballgames that Troy confronted her at work, and in a matter of days, a pack of feminist she-wolves had pounced on his father with breathtaking viciousness.

Although Randy had thought back over that period many times, and invariably felt deeply indignant on his father's behalf, he had never begun to grasp the full burden of false accusation -- until now.

* * *

Randy had been waiting about ten minutes when he saw Flora Jackson's Oldsmobile stop in the parking lot and drop off a passenger before turning back to the road.  Keyonne headed for the entrance to the field house, but happened to glance in Randy's direction, and paused.

Randy's heart beat faster and a sick feeling settled in the pit of his stomach.  Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea, after all.  Still, he was here and Keyonne had seen him. He might as well do what he came here to do.

He wasn't sure what to expect.  Perhaps Keyonne would ignore him and keep walking.  Perhaps he would cold-cock him.  Randy would never know until he went to him.

Head high, dignity intact, Randy stepped across the gravel, and Keyonne turned toward him.  Randy could detect no hostility in his demeanor or actions.  When ten feet separated them, they stopped and stared at one another.

Randy inhaled deeply.  "I've been wanting to see you, and ask you something, since this whole thing started."

Keyonne nodded noncommittally.  "Arright."

Throat tightening, Randy swallowed hard.  "Do you believe I hurt your sister?"

Pain came to Keyonne's face and he shook his head.

Distressed by his friend's silence, Randy had to make his case.  "I didn't."

"I know that," Keyonne said.  "I know it's not in you to do somethin' like that.  I've been wanting to tell you I don't hold nothin' against you.  But I guess I didn't have the guts."

Randy blinked back a stinging in his eyes as relief almost like pain washed over him.  "What about Miss Flo? I've been so worried that she might hate me."

Keyonne shook his head.  "Mama didn't want to believe Tam would lie about something like that, especially about someone who's been my friend for so long.  But we all know how she is. She's a slut, Randy, and a druggie. Hate to say that about my own half-sister, but she is. In the past year, her grades have fallen so's she's barely passing.  She don't act like herself.  It's breakin' Mama's heart."

"I didn't know."

"I told Mama from the start I didn't believe it.  But I guess when you're a mama, it's hard not to stand by your daughter, especially when she's in the shape Tam's in.  She's a nutcase most of the time."

"Keyonne, I'm so sorry to hear that."

"Mama believed Tam at first, but I can see that mama's doubts have grown.  It hard for her to think that an innocent boy could go to prison for thirty years based on a lie told by her child."

Randy nodded, unable to speak for a  moment.  The stinging in his eyes turned to a film of tears and he blinked hard.  "I have to go.  Thanks for talking to me."  He turned toward his motorcycle.

"Randy."

He looked back.

"I don't know if our friendship will survive this," Keyonne said.  Now tears pooled in his eyes, too.  "I hope so. But whatever happens, I'll always think the world of you, and your mama and daddy, and your sister. Tell them I said that."

He held out his hand.  They walked to each other and grasped the base of each other's thumbs in a trembling handshake. Without another word, they parted. Keyonne resumed his trek to the field house and Randy kickstarted his motorcycle, rolled out of the parking lot, and headed home.

_________________________________________
No people of color in my "imagined" South? Methinks Brooks D. Simpson's own bigotry and intolerance, which involves actually perpetuating falsehoods about others (i.e., deliberately misconstruing and misstating what I had written about my novels, stories, characters, etc.), is far worse than that of people he accuses of it. 

Is anybody really surprised at this?

Trashy Novels? Installment One

Men as victims, falsely accused. Evil feminists. In Chastain’s fictional world, women are the protagonists, men simply objects upon which women project much (good or evil). And there’s a strong sexual undercurrent in them, sometimes veering toward the strange.... 

No wonder your “books” have not captured the imagination.... They’re simply not very good.

... your self-published novels ... tend toward the trashy.

The comments above were written by a critic of mine who is bigoted toward me because I'm a proSoutherner and a proponent of Southern (i.e., Confederate) heritage. His disapproval of me includes disparaging "reviews" of my novels which, significantly, he hasn't read, on his personal blog.

I'm not sure how he conceptualizes "strong sexual undercurrent". I don't know if I would apply that term to my stories -- I've described them, especially Southern Man, as having sexual themes, and a strong sexual component because, well, it's difficult to write about sexual harassment or the destructive fallout of the sexual revolution with writing about ... sex.

Here's a description of my first release, written cover-blurb style.

In 1983, in moss-hung Verona, Georgia, the tender and tenacious love between a hardworking man and his adoring wife is tested by sudden adversity.

Corporate executive Troy Stevenson must confront his nascent alcohol abuse or he risks losing the wife, daughter and son he deeply loves.  When his latent destructiveness impacts his family,  he moves to their weekend cottage to come to grips with his personal weaknesses.

But busybodies at his company assume he left home because his marriage is in trouble. Encouraged by the assumption, co-worker Brooke Emerson, an amoral, 1980s material girl romantically obsessed with Troy, attempts to seduce him, setting in motion a chain of events with harrowing consequences for him and his family.

Southern Man takes readers from the hills of Appalachia to the University of Alabama during the Paul "Bear" Bryant era; from staid New England to drug-drenched and sex-saturated Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love; from the glittering skyline of Atlanta to moss-hung south Georgia -- and reveals what can happen when a good man becomes the object of lust and the target of vengeance.

Yes, there are without doubt "sexy" passages in the novel.  But are they trashy? In my opinion, trashy sex scenes are written to titillate the reader -- usually solely for that reason. I believe this is the motive for writing pornography, erotica (porn lite) and erotic romance (porn extra-lite).

By contrast, the sexy scenes in Southern Man serve at least two main purposes -- to illustrate the strong sexual bond, within marriage, between the protagonist and his wife; and to compare it with the destructive "free-love" style of sex handed down from the sexual revolution. Below is an excerpt that I consider to be one of the most overtly sexual passages in the novel.

Being each other’s first and only, Patty had nothing to compare him to, but she was quite certain that there was no better lover on earth. As newlyweds, they learned sex together, doing what came naturally and teaching each other. He could be the tenderest, most attentive lover imaginable. Most of the time, he was sweet and slow, his attention focused on her—on loving and pleasing her. But other times, more rarely, he was an animal, intense and vigorous and single-minded, in it for himself, driven by his body’s physiological need for release. Then, he seemed hypersensitive to everything she did, every touch, every kiss, the very sound of her voice. Both extremes filled Patty's heart with love for him, like Scripture said—good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over—even as they filled her body with cravings for him. She especially cherished the knowledge that no one else in the world—nobody but she—knew what he was like when he was sexed up. That part of him was hers, and hers alone. Nobody but she had ever seen him when his hair was tousled by his lover’s fingers ... when his lips grew red and his lipline went fuzzy ... when moonlight slanting through the windows reflected off the whites of his eyes and the tips of his teeth, making them glow like nacre ... when, under lowered lids, his dark eyes smouldered, and his beautiful face took on a sultry expression of yearning ... when he was caught up in the warm, dreamy pursuit of ultimate gratification, and his respiration would go from long and deep to quick and staccato ... when it would catch in his throat from a spike in pleasure as they slowly, tantalizingly worked their way toward fulfillment ... it was like making love to an angel come down from heaven.

Trashy? You tell me.

I'll visit this subject again in the future.