Affirmative Action at a Glance

Affirmative Action was the misleading name for a discriminatory hiring practice in the late 20th Century that allowed unqualified non-white people to be hired for a job instead of qualified white people. This unsuccessful and unnecessary social program was eagerly employed by stupid and scared American employers who were afraid to demand federal and state tax money to educate and train these non-white people so they would be qualified.

Another misnomer for Affirmative Action was Equal Opportunity which suggested that qualified non-white people would be given the same chance for a job as qualified white people. But, since this idea had virtually nothing wrong with it and was applauded by just about all Americans, it was not as successful as Affirmative Action, which forced people to march to a government tune instead of freely doing what the government wanted them to do anyway.

Affirmative Action was the second stupidest social program the federal government ever made into law, next to Prohibition, both of which proved to hard-working Americans and Americans who wished they had the opportunity to work hard, that letting Uncle Sam secure the American Dream for you will only backfire and leave you holding your hat in your hand.

M*A*S*H*I*N*G America

M*A*S*H, a TV sitcom airing from 1972 to 1983, was about a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Or at least it was supposed to be. Starring self-anointed feminist actor and Groucho Marx wannabe, Alan Alda, as Captain Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H quickly degraded into an Alan Alda soapbox for anti-war and anti-American dissent after its first two seasons and the show's unscrupulous and opportunistic producers, writers, directors and cast never looked back. What ensued was the liberal, bleeding-heart, Baby-Boomer version of the Korean War, not a cool comedy about Army doctors and nurses.

What Baby-Boomer issues, you might ask? Well, the preposterous notion that men and women are interchangeable, for one thing. And the idea that marital infidelity, fornication, cross-dressing (even if it is just a "dodge" to get out of the Army) and homosexuality were perfectly natural and acceptable social behavior for the early 1950s. Oops, that's right, this sitcom was about the Korean War, not Vietnam. I guess the writers, producers and directors just plum forgot.

There's more. M*A*S*H tried its best to perpetuate Baby-Boomer myths like the misconception that doctors can operate on patients at peak levels after drinking the still dry and really talented surgeons can get away with all kinds of anti-social behavior then hide behind their unbeatable skills as surgeons when the crap hits the fan. Or putting the wounded enemy patients ahead of the American and Allied wounded for treatment. Or not tossing a Korean thief out on his ear when he robs you blind after you agree to put him through college in The States at your own expense. What twisted, illogical, ridiculous crap. What kind of role models were these for young American viewers who were already screwed up by having divorced parents or parents who were high most of the time or in jail for not paying their income taxes?

The funniest thing about M*A*S*H was McLean Stevenson as Colonel Henry Blake. But he left at the end of the third season, to be replaced by a 9-year view up Harry Morgan's incredibly large nostrils, along with "Colonel Potter's" boring, mundane, running commentary on life and everything Army. Considered by many to be "the worst career move in television history", McLean Stevenson's departure left the show at the mercy of Alan Alda and the writers who loved this pantywaist's shlocky delivery of their asinine lines that were anti-everything-traditional and heavy-on-the-Jewish-humor.

Larry Linville's portrayal of Major Frank Burns and Loretta Swit's Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan were the only other funny things left. But when Larry Linville departed after the fifth season, "Hot Lips" Houlihan became just plain Margaret Houlihan, a major feminist whiner with a big, man-hating axe to grind on our own personal prime time. More Baby-Boomer issues in place of 1950's army hospital comedy. More soapbox dissent in place of entertainment.

And why go into details about the other regular characters, like Radar O'Reilly, Spearchucker Jones, Ginger Bayliss, Father Mulcahy, Maxwell Klinger, "Trapper" John McIntyre, B.J. Hunnicutt and Charles Emerson Winchester? I mean, what can you say about a brown-noser, your token black character, your token black female character, a geeky guy who doesn't like girls, a homely cross-dresser, a lame comic sidekick, a lamer comic sidekick, and a rich, hateful snob that hasn't been said before?

But, as bad as it was, M*A*S*H the TV Show was still better than M*A*S*H the Movie, starring Donald Sutherland as Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce and Elliot Gould as Captain John "Trapper" McIntyre. M*A*S*H the Movie was the most boring, the least funny and the lewdest Army comedy I've ever seen. Robert Duvall was sorely miscast as Frank Burns and Sally Kellerman's brief offering of eye candy (as a much hotter "Hot Lips" Houlihan than Loretta Swit could ever be) was, unfortunately, this dog of a movie's only memorable moment.

So, that's not saying much for the Alan Alda vehicle that took us for a whining, crying, anti-war ride every week for a dozen long years, without mercy. Yep, for an unbelievable 12 seasons this schizophrenic sitcom seesawed back and forth between cheesy, sight-gag, back-biting, sarcastic humor and the depths of utter, tear-jerker, self-inflicted despair before CBS finally put this out-of-touch sitcom out of its own misery in 1983 with a two-hour finale entitled, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen". This last episode of M*A*S*H aired live on big-screen TVs in taverns, clubs, restaurants, sports bars and Baby-Boomer watering holes all across America. It even set a record as "the most-watched television episode in U.S. television history", a fact that should have come as no surprise to anyone. Hell, nothing loves company like misery. Especially when alcohol is involved.

The "Roman Send-off" for this highly overrated TV sitcom was affectionately dubbed the "M*A*S*H Bash" by its millions of rabid, teary-eyed fans and, in fact, this finale was nothing more than 12 years worth of recaps and show highlights rolled into two hours of public drinking, group hugging and therapeutic crying jags. The fact that M*A*S*H immediately went into syndication after its highly-publicized euthanasia proved the theory that mystery, murder and crime don't attract nearly as big a TV viewing audience as sexual innuendo, social commentary and human suffering packaged together as a situation comedy.

Muscle Car Madness

"Muscle Cars" were two-door "coupes" made in the 1960s and 1970s for young American males who had no respect for the posted speed limits or local noise ordinances or the safety of their passengers or sleeping neighbors.

These cars were manufactured by every major American automaker and they boasted huge internal combustion engines that were often "turbo-charged" with extra air intakes so they would be even faster and noisier. Muscle cars were almost invariably equipped with four-on-the-floor standard transmissions and after-market gear shifts and/or gear-shift knobs. After-market mufflers with virtually no noise-reduction properties usually replaced the factory-installed mufflers.

"Popping the clutch" on these cars enabled the ability to "peel out" or "burn rubber" or "lay gum", which was the recreational destruction of tire tread through friction. This was a common practice of all muscle car drivers in order to enhance their driving experience with reckless swerving, smoke and banshee-like squealing. Beer was often consumed in the car by drivers and passengers, especially during weekends when American youths used their hometowns as their personal amusement park, garbage dump and public toilet.

Many of these freaky automobiles came in garish colors like electric yellow and blaze orange so they would stand out even more among the normal, family, passenger cars of their generation. Most muscle cars were hardtops, some were sloped "fast backs" and a smaller portion of them were convertibles, without roll bars. Roll bars were an added safety feature that was considered to be a "chickenshit" feature by the screwed-up youths who drove these muscle cars. Muscle car driving had nothing whatsoever to do with safety or responsibility.

Most of the devil-may-care "greaser" rednecks who drove these hideous, noisy cars had no clue that every type of muscle car appeared on state police profile lists all over America as the first cars to hold a radar gun on or to follow closely for driving violations. The muscle car lovers who did know this fact either didn't care or simply thrived on the inevitable police pursuit.

Muscle car madness swept through America the Beautiful for two generations and it was an unbridled exhibition of American Youth at its worst.

The Old Swimming Hole

Back in the 20th Century every rural community had a natural place for people to swim. They were called "swimming holes". Why a pool of water was ever called a "hole" was something I never understood but then I don't have to understand something in order to enjoy it.

Some swimming holes were dammed-up creeks where the water would be just over a grownup's head. Others were nothing more than a deep pool of water, often at a curve in a stream where the water flowed slowly in the summertime. Often there was a large tree shading the pool. Some of the "neatest" swimming holes were beaver dams. If you could swim with beavers and get past the smell, you were on your way to having a lot of fun.

Then there were the big community swimming holes where townspeople would get together and build a big earthen dam with bulldozers and divert a natural creek into it. A week later the dam would be full of water, sometimes ten feet deep or more at the breast of the dam. Big pipes let water in and out so that the water would never become a stagnant home for mosquitoes. The dammed-up water would usually be muddy until the following year. Then boardwalks and diving boards would be erected and sand brought in from elsewhere. A lot of people brought picnic lunches and families would spend entire afternoons at the old swimming hole.

Then along came the environmental do-gooders in the 1960s and the American swimming hole tradition went down the pipe. We were convinced by people with college degrees and new ideas about fun and health and the environment that we were stupid hicks who needed to be shown. These folks also had the elected or appointed authority to enforce the laws that other do-gooders with even more power had signed into law. Nobody could legally swim in a stream, creek or river anymore because of so-called concerns for the public health and the environment.

As a mere boy in the 1960s, I don't recall anyone being harmed by a swimming hole or a single fish being injured or killed because of a kid or a mom or a dad or even an uncle swimming in the water alongside it. But then I never understood why these same do-gooder types tore up all the rural railroad tracks in the 1960s and built concrete highways to replace them. Concrete super highways that were built at the cost of millions of acres of natural woodland and fields. Wild places that used to be homes for countless animals living in their rightful and natural environment. So much for the environmental issue there.

We were convinced by the people in power that swimming in a chlorinated concrete pool would be a lot safer for us. Herding us into big community concrete pools became mainly a public health issue when these goody-goodies realized that we weren't buying the "good for the environment" lie. At least nobody in my state gave a damn about the environment back in the 1960s. That was obvious after the interstates were built. But what they did care about was money. The bottom line.

Before the environmental and health officials let the water out of our swimming holes, we all swam for nothing. Now we all pay for the privilege of walking on blazing-hot surfaces and swimming in fake-blue water that smells like toothpaste and tastes like medicine. This is a sad but true American saga where the winners were the cash registers and the losers were everyone else.

Milton Berle in a Thimble

Milton Merle was a sickening, lip-heavy, nasty, lewd, unfunny comedian who was known as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during the so-called "Golden Age of Television".

Milton Berle's idea of stand-up comedy consisted of insulting people and cross-dressing, as though both were the most natural and inoffensive thing in the world.

American TV viewers west of the Hudson River eventually proved his theory about comedy to be wrong.

20th Century Decades in 10 Words Each

1900s – Like the Gay Nineties but with more cars than horses.

1910s – Except for the Great War, it was the 1900s again.

1920s – Moguls made money while workers drank, fornicated and celebrated peace.

1930s – Americans lost everything they had because of stock market speculators.

1940s – Men fought World War II while women did everything else.

1950s – People made babies by the bushel while Detroit made cars.

1960s – The Beatles, Hippies and Vietnam put the kibosh on America.

1970s – People forgot how to dress properly but no one cared.

1980s – People didn't wear enough clothing but no one cared again.

1990s – Angry youths terrorized the world with electric guitars and drums.

A 20th-Century Holiday Greeting

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

"Candid Camera" in 25 Words or Less

1960's black-and-white reality show where Alan Funt secretly filmed unsuspecting people and made fun of them without getting arrested, sued, slapped, beaten, or shot.

The Clinton Administration in 50 Words or Less

With Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House, the last eight years of the 20th Century were banner years for the U.S. There were no wars, gasoline and housing was affordable and there were plenty of jobs to go around. These are facts that most Americans have completely forgotten.

Author's Note: 3-23-14: So what? Even a baby boomer like me can be fooled.

"Nash Bridges" in More Words Than It Deserves

This was a pathetic 1990's television crime drama that even ran into the 21st Century before viewers finally realized that this stupid, sleazy series portrayed The San Francisco Police Department as a bunch of liberal freaks who couldn't keep it zipped long enough to arrest anyone, especially if the suspects represented the city's GLBT "community".

Star Don Johnson, almost but not quite reinventing his Miami Vice role as Detective Sonny Crockett, portrayed Nash Bridges, a skirt chaser whose misplaced priorities made him love everyone just so damn much that the fine line between right and wrong, and good and evil, seemed to get in the way of his hooking up with yet another woman. An unconventional woman, of course, by looks and trade, who'd fall for the expensive, offbeat ensembles he sported and that annoying, raspy laugh and agree to a mutually anticipated one-night-stand. Quite often, she was also the criminal he was investigating. No conflict of interest there, of course, according to the 1990's "anything goes" rules. More often than not, she wised up and skedaddled like someone who had a brain. So, Nash, persistent as a dog with two erections, simply rubbed out that line and never looked back.

Nash Bridges had a partner and side-kick, naturally. Character Joe Dominguez was played by veteran cheesy comic actor Cheech Marin who gave up his quest for the ultimate marijuana high to portray an aging Hispanic-American Yuppie who worshiped the shallow and artificial world of Yuppie things. Like wearing over-priced, hideous-looking suits, driving top-of-the-line European automobiles and making money hand-over-fist off other unsuspecting Yuppies, whether they were members of San Francisco's GLBT "community" or not. Before "Nash Bridges" aired, Cheech Marin made you laugh as a lazy, unambitious lover of life. But, as part of the "Nash Bridges" cast, he made you want to puke.

Nash ran the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the SFPD where Joe was his next-in-command. This unit evolved over time as people came and went from the show. Some of them were good investigators (characters Harvey Leek, Bryn Carson and Michelle Chan, portrayed by Jeff Perry, Mary Mara and Kelly Hu) and some of them were nothing more than walking erections, like Inspector Evan Cortez, portrayed by Jaime Gomez, and Rick Bettina, played by Daniel Roebuck. Evan's round-the-clock, skirt-chasing exploits made Nash's nocturnal prowling look innocent by comparison. Evan Cortez and his string of female targets, including the first ex-wife and daughter of his boss, Nash Bridges, almost single-handedly transformed "Nash Bridges" from a TV crime drama into yet another predictable, sordid, formulaic soap.

One of the soapiest (and creepiest) things about "Nash Bridges" was Nash's father, Nick Bridges, portrayed by James Gammon. This was the seediest and most aggravating part of the show for me. Nash's two ex-wives couldn't hold a candle to Nash's raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing father for making lots of soapy trouble. Instead of being an old man with Alzheimer's, aging gracefully and enjoying what family and time he had left, Nick Bridges was the old man from hell and any old woman's worst nightmare. Nick Bridges couldn't keep it zipped, either, and this seemed to be a feature of this sleazy series that apparently attracted a lot of sick fans. Instead of being a grandfather who smoked a pipe in his slippers and easy chair, Nick Bridges was a dirty old man whose addiction to women, cards, cigars, and the ponies made him the perfect anti-flyover grandfather. Just the kind of dad and granddad that makes San Franciscans so proud and so cutting edge, while the rest of America is stuck with upholding the traditional values and virtues of grandfatherhood. No wonder Nash called his father "Nick" instead of "Dad". Apparently, "Dad" is no longer cool in America the Beautiful.

This ludicrous show almost seemed to go out of its way to convince American viewers that it was perfectly all right to let the good times roll and to hell with the consequences. But, every now and then, they would have Nash actually put a bad guy in the slammer temporarily and the bad guy was usually a white heterosexual man who spent an awful lot of money on clothing and fine dining. And that seemed to be the real purpose, albeit underlying, for airing "Nash Bridges". To showcase San Francisco as the jewel of the West Coast and San Franciscans as super-educated and super-cool Yuppies who wore the best labels and frequented all the best restaurants. As if any of that crap ever mattered in life. "Nash Bridges" was a deliberate snub to regular Americans in the fly-over states but no one seemed to get it.

And any stupid, redneck hillbilly from Appalachia could have told you that.

Y2K Through the Keyhole

The year 2000 was called Y2K in the last decade of the 20th Century by people who had an unhealthy, shameless fascination with it as well as an unfounded and ridiculous fear of it. These were the hi-tech freaks who were so in love with their personal computers and the Internet that they couldn’t imagine a new millennium or a new century or a new decade or even a new year without them.

In the average person's earthbound mind, the year 2000 was mistaken for the first year of a new decade, new century and new millennium, not the last year of the last decade of the 20th Century. So, instead of just being the year 2000, it was magically transformed into the infamous Y2K, where everything in cyberland would suddenly break down because supposedly short-sighted 20th-Century computer programmers had not allowed for the advent of the year 2000 in their programs.

So, the catalyst for all the Y2K hype was the misconception that the year 2000 was not the last year of the 20th Century but the first year of the 21st Century. Most people had no clue that the year 2001 would fit that bill like a glove. It was the number "2" that mesmerized everybody. A year starting with a "2" instead of a "1" could not possibly be part of the 20th Century. 2000 just had to be the super-cool first year of the hi-tech, space-bound new millennium. Even though it wasn't. Turning a blind eye to the truth, they called it Y2K instead of 2000 and didn't look back. Y2K belonged to the 21st Century and there was nothing that anybody with a brain could do to change that.

The great World Wide Web, only five-years-old, would die a swift and sudden death at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1999, Greenwich Time, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Hospital machines would stop dispensing medicine, computerized manufacturing would grind to a halt, governments would fail, missiles would fire and Armageddon would arrive as predicted. And all because of the Y2K “bug”.

But none of that stuff happened.

And any so-called stupid, redneck hillbilly from Appalachia could have told you that.

Free Lunch

I used to wonder why white-collar workers in America jumped at every opportunity to attend a conference somewhere. But I finally figured out the real reason why office workers flocked to conferences like flies took to shit way before conferences were even called conferences. I was in the know and even hip about the secret world of conferences and the underground cult of conference goers when most conferences were still called “conventions”.

A convention was an overnight conference held in a hotel in some far away town. Convention goers were bored office workers and frustrated white-collar middle managers who needed a little break from their daily paper-pushing routine and a lot of eagerly anticipated, devilish diversion in someone else’s back yard. Have fun and let someone else clean up the mess afterward became America’s new service-industry corporate motto. This went hand-in-hand with America’s new white-collar corporate mission: Don’t get caught.

When paper-pushing was tossed out the service industry door in the 1990s, along with the single-tasking “pencil necks” who earned their living via telephones and filing cabinets, a new age of multi-tasking “computer keyboarders” and e-mail processors took over. Still, they got just as bored and frustrated as anyone else and needed a night or two on the town. Somebody else’s town, that is, and at the company’s expense. So, they invented "conferences" because the word sounded more progressive and high-end. After all, pencil necks went to conventions to skip convention meetings and to play poker all night long, if a tawdry one-night stand or a schoolboy shaving cream battle wasn’t in the offing. Computer keyboarders, on the other hand, would attend conferences mainly to “eat free food”. As Y2K approached, the all-you-can-eat buffet replaced lascivious carousing and unfettered mischief in white-collar corporate America.

When America’s service industry discovered that its over-tasked office staffs were signing up in droves for free food, managers stopped planning so many big-budget conferences and started offering conferences on the other side of town. Lavish business conferences became simple day-trips to a prepaid food trough.

Windows 95, therefore, spawned the biggest service industry perk of all time. White-collar workers had finally found their gastro G-spot. And no one ever looked back.

Like Disco, the “Free Lunch” had arrived.

Quest For Chocolate

Way back in elementary school I’d often stop in at one of three places in town where you could buy candy and one of my favorite confections back then was a chocolate bar. Back in 1950's Appalachia there wasn’t much of a selection to choose from. You had your Hershey Bar and your Nestle bar and then in the 1960s the chocolate wizards came out with the blocky chocolate bar they called a Chunky. Still, I’d found Nirvana at an early age and it was wrapped in foil and paper and it melted quickly in the sun.

As I grew older and started getting off the school bus, I still had chocolate fever, but I was grooming my taste buds for the more exotic candy bars like Mallo Cup with the vanilla cream center, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, Three Musketeers and Snickers. Then, when I was totally hooked on nuts with my chocolate, I discovered Almond Joy, Fifth Avenue, Mars Bar and Hershey’s With Almonds. I never looked back. Well, almost.

Of course, that’s when I liked a chocolate candy bar with a soda. Now, as a grown man, I wouldn’t even think about washing down a mouthful of masticated chocolate with a bubbly soft drink. Now it’s either cold milk or hot coffee, the latter of which can cause certain unwanted side effects that will make you wish you’d had the milk instead. Or even a caffeine-free soda.

It wasn’t until I reached my forties that I discovered that I hadn’t really been enjoying chocolate all along. I’d been eating “milk chocolate”. The snobby experts on TV food shows told us that milk chocolate wasn’t even chocolate, as far as they were concerned. Real chocolate, they said, was “dark chocolate”, which contained more cocoa and less milk. I had to remind myself that these were the same people who looked down their noses at yellow mustard and who took great pains to hold their wine glass by the stem at all times.

Later, in the 21st Century, more experts explained on TV and in magazines and health pamphlets that cocoa contained “bioflavonoids” that had health benefits and could even prevent cancer. But, still, I thought, dark chocolate was bitter and tasted like a candy bar that someone had forgotten to add the rest of the ingredients to. Like sugar and milk.

By now, at age 56, I have the answer to it all. I’ll just eat two or three times as much milk chocolate and wash it down with twice as much milk. And, once in a great while, I’ll eat a little piece of Hershey’s Dark with a cup of coffee, just to be health conscious. Gain weight? Get fat? Well, yeah, there is that. Still, I’ll be better off than most Appalachian men who mellow out with Jack Daniels and Budweiser. Plus, after I’ve had my chocolate fix, I can still get behind the wheel of a car with a clear conscience.

There you go. Who says you can’t teach and ol’ dawg new tricks?

Dust Bowl Parade

America’s Great Depression began in 1929, right after the great big Stock Market Crash that same year, and it was economic hard times on a grand scale, partly caused by the Crash itself. The other reason for the Great Depression, which lasted a full decade, was the unequal distribution of wealth in America during the 1920s, which was basically a non-distribution of wealth.

In the Twenties 58% of America’s total wealth was owned by the top 1% of the population. That would be the Fords and the Carnegies and the Mellons and the Rockefellers and all the other big movers and shakers, including all the barons of oil, coal, lumber, railroading and manufacturing.

Henry Ford’s personal annual income was more than $14 million in 1929 while the average American made a mere $750 that same year. In other words, Henry Ford made as much money in 1929 as 18,000 Americans combined, which drastically illustrates the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States at that time. Industry controlled most of the wealth in America the Beautiful and the farmers – the real producers of America’s great bounty – controlled zilch, nada, nothing. Although they fed everyone. And no one in America thought this gross inequity would cause any problems for them down the road. Boy, were they wrong.

Basically, there was no middle class in the United States during the 1920s, which was America’s biggest banner decade for making money and lots of it. The only trouble was that only 1% of the country’s people were making it and we already know who they were. It gets worse.

Not only did the rich and famous and powerful have just about all the money, they wanted it all for themselves. That’s why the people who worked for the rich didn’t earn enough to do much of anything with their pittances except buy things from the rich. Often at company stores owned and operated by their employers. The U.S. didn’t want Europe selling its goods to Americans, either, and to ensure that they put such an outrageous tariff on anything coming into America that nobody in Europe could afford to ship anything over. If the rich Yanks wanted anything from Europe, hell, they’d just go over there and get it for themselves.

The American rich also liked to play with their money and their favorite game was Wall Street. They traded over a billion shares in 1928 and artificially drove the stock prices up so high that the prices of stocks no longer reflected the actual economic and fiscal performance of the companies they represented. The stock market soared. It flew high on a wave of pure confidence in American big business. But that all came to a head in October 1929 when the moneylenders and the money tenders wised up and became afraid of what they’d been doing for the past decade. That fear drove the prices of stocks back down so fast that even the ticker tape couldn’t keep up. A nation built on confidence had suddenly gone belly up due to fear. Fear of being wiped out. A self-fulfilling prophecy, indeed.

Suddenly there was no money for investment and none for paying America’s mortgages. Farmers were kicked off their farms. Folks lost their homes. People were laid off. The only real money to be made was in crime.

But the real criminals were America’s moguls and magnates, the rich who always got richer by the sweat of someone else’s brow. And these barons of bullshit never did a single day of time in a federal pen and they were all just as guilty as Al Capone. Maybe even guiltier.

The only thing “great” about the Great Depression was that it was somehow a great big surprise to everyone when they should have heard it knocking on their front door all along. Then they could have booted it the hell out before it ever had a chance to enter.

The Korean War in 100 Words or Less

This was the big retirement party President Harry Truman threw for General Douglas MacArthur in June 1950 on the Korean peninsula between mainland China and Japan. This military bash lasted clear until July 1953, long after Truman departed the White House and a grateful America put Dwight Eisenhower at the helm.

It even lasted after Truman booted MacArthur out of his own retirement party in April 1951 for being a spoiled, bad boy by trying to invite China and Russia to join the festivities. And that was because the food, lodging and fireworks had already been bought and paid for.

“Hanoi Jane” in 25 Words or Less

Jane Fonda, spoiled American actress, Jet Setter and “peace activist”, betrayed her own country with impunity as a Vietnam-War-Era traitor, anarchist and Viet Cong spy.

Always on Sunday

Back in the 20th Century, and especially before 1970 when the American family as an American institution began its fateful journey toward extinction, Moms and Dads all over America loaded up the kids into the family car and went on a Sunday drive.

The Sunday drive was as much a part of American family life in that part of the last century as the Saturday shopping trip into town and a big Sunday dinner the day after that. When both parents of many American families had to go to work in the 1960s because a dragon called inflation began burning up their pocketbooks, the weekend was the only real time for family activities.

A drive into the countryside was the most popular kind of Sunday drive in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, even though most of us here already lived out in the country. But it was great to get out of the house and out of town and on the road, to nowhere in particular. That’s what the Sunday drive was all about. Having no destination other than arriving back home after spotting as many deer as you could and listening to Mom and Dad remark about the budding trees or the mountain laurel or the fall foliage. Some Sunday drives, however, took place in the early evening and with the kiddies already in their pajamas or otherwise dressed for bed. The purpose? To put the kids to sleep and carry them out of the car afterward and directly to bed. Then Mom and Dad would have a rare evening all to themselves.

I don’t think many people go on Sunday drives anymore. If they do, it’s probably to get to Walmart and back as fast as possible. Or to get to work. That’s sad, because some of my fondest memories of childhood are being in the back seat of our Chevy Bel Air and hearing Mom suddenly exclaim, “Oh, look at all the deer!”