THIS LAND
For those of you considering leaving this great country because is may be in a bit of trouble. It may be in a lot of trouble.
Don’t leave. ..
THE SIXTH NIGHT, 30 Days Has September
The rolling artillery barrage I’d designed, and the battery had applied so effectively, was of exactly no use in doing anything to damage or disable booby traps that were not constructed with detonators or explosives subject to sympathetic detonation. The machine gun had caused significant casualties ……..
THE SIXTH DAY THIRD PART, 30 Days has September
My scout team took apart my hooch and packed me out while I went forward to the perimeter to lay in the defensive fire up and down the area of our travel. The sun was fast rising over the jungle when I laid down on a poncho cover provided by one of the Marines on the line….
THE ELECTION 2016
Today is the big day before the big day. Will civility, manners, and outrageous behavior be rewarded or will there be a return to cultural sanity of accepted social behavior on the morrow?
PETER WILSON
Peter Wilson, a local attorney and a friend of mine, died in his sleep last night. He had a magnificently bold but weak heart. He was also one of those very rare humans in that he thought I was a better person and much greater than I really am…..
NUCLEAR MEDIA EXPLOSION
The abomination of today’s media. The evidence for this abomination is staring us all right in the face every day and could, by next week, lead directly to the end of the great America dream of freedom and liberty….
THE SIXTH DAY SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September
“If you go chasing rabbits and you know you’re going to fall, tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call…” played on Stevens’ little shoulder-mounted radio. As usual, Brother John’s fatherly deep throated introduction made me feel better just ...
AMERICAN SCUM
Scum. How is America ever going back from scum owning the mass media. Absolutely lousy American companies like Disney, that used to be terrific companies, now owned by the most awful of people who don’t give a damn about the country or its people……
Chickenman Episodes, Feathered Fighter Returns
Four more episodes of Chickenman, the Fearless Feathered Fighter of Felons. Chickenman radio shows were welcomed and put a smile on many weary Marines and other service personnel in the Vietnam War, through Armed Forces Radio Enjoy the fun and please comment below and...
SHAVED LEMURS
The Supreme Court. Why the House of Representatives, resisting efforts to appoint anyone to fill the vacant U.S. Supreme Court role, has little to do with partisan politics. Say what? Everything is the opposite of what they are saying…..
4 More Chickenman Episodes
The White Winged Warrior continues his crusade to be the number one crime fighter in Midland. Chickenman (aka Benton Harbor) would probably would have more success without his mother and the chief of Police. Episode 9 The Feathered Fighter Flaps his wings Furiously...
THE ELECTION and the Cubs
Election and the Chicago Cubs It is Sunday night, which means that we only have a week and a day of this election cycle to go. Can we hack it? What will be the next scandal or investigation, tape or audio recording? Whom will come forth to be famous or to be the...
THE SIXTH DAY, 30 Days Has September
Full dawn would not come. I lay there, looking at my little Fusner-dug moat. The mist had stayed all night, which I now knew to be the precursor to the monsoon season. It could get worse. It would get worse. Just how in hell God would figure out a way to make it...
On the Road Again, FREEDOM TOWER
What I wanted it to be. The monument and museum of the World Trade Center. I wanted it to be quintessential American. I wanted it to be the best of what a Walt Disney might come up with or the Hollywood people who put on the Olympics that year……..
James Strauss, On the Road Again FLEEING NEW YORK
It’s overcast in New York but I am used to that. The pall that seems to hang over the city most of the time keeps the rest of the world from seeing what goes on here. At least, that’s the way my mind works upon waking and lolling about in the room…….
James Strauss On The Road Again PLAZA HOTEL
Went downstairs to the Plaza lobby and ate breakfast there. Do not ask the price. I put it on the room so I would not know. It was salmon and six minute eggs with all this greens stuff………..
Mass Media has Challenges?
Just how do you think the mass media is going to keep everyone on the edge of the their seats until the election? They’ve got to do it. It literally means billions to them, and so they go to work…..
THE RACING TRAIN
Two weeks to go until the world won’t have Trump to kick around anymore. Women, for the most part, will be safer. Mexican’s will not be employed building a wall to nowhere…….
James Strauss On the Road Again, NEW YORK,
James Strauss on the the Road Again October 2016 New York I am enjoying the press of humanity and circulating among the core constituents of this age old war playing out right now in America’s national election. Oh, not the Civil War, although that is still a...
THE FIFTH NIGHT THIRD PART, 30 Days Has September
The NVA Russian-made fifty caliber opened up, and the heavy green ‘flying lantern’ tracers tore through the thick air over our heads. I popped my head up for a micro-second to confirm that they’d moved the weapon lower down on the mountain’s front slope. I adjusted my...
THE FIFTH NIGHT SECOND PART 30 Days Has September
Zippo didn’t get back from retrieving the starlight scope from Rittenhouse until full dark. There’d been no fire from the hill. I’d registered our new position but not ordered a fire mission. I knew it wouldn’t be long. I wasn’t afraid of taking fire from a heavy...
MAUREEN DOWD
Maureen Dowd was on Sunday Morning this Sunday morning. With her sister and other siblings. Maureen has had a lot of work done. I always wonder, man or woman, what people who have surgery for aging would look like without it. I’ve seen so much of it in...
Black Mirror
Black Mirror is out. The third season. The cutting edge ski-fi show so highly acclaimed from England……
OH, AMERICA!
This is a very difficult process the nation is going through. The selection of this particular president is becoming more divisive for the American population than almost any that have come before. Reflect and think about what is going on. There really is no effective...
THE FIFTH NIGHT
The sun was low enough to allow for some cooler air to flow among the bamboo and cypress jammed jungle around me. Low enough to allow the mosquitos to begin to form their more than annoying small clouds, as if they possessed group minds in search of evilly-conceived targets….
THE CONTENTIOUS ASSHOLE OF OUR TIME
Well, the last debate is history. Hillary is a “nasty woman,” according to Trump, as his back of the school bus kind of low intellectual insults continued…….
EFFIGY
I did a short video on a Donald Trump display set up just north of town here in Lake Geneva. I did not say it was a bad thing. They put up a paper mache effigy of Hillary in prison attire however, and some nasty stuff about her under it. I reflected in my voiceover...
FIFTH DAY THIRD PART
The Gunny and Sugar Daddy looked at me when I approached, but neither man stood up. I hadn’t expected them to. I was becoming fully adjusted to life beyond Marine training and stateside barracks behavior. I dumped my supply of C-rations, and other stuff I’d gotten...
Wandering, Adrift and Alone
Donald Trump is blaming Paul Ryan and the republican party for the current sexual scandal he is living inside. He’s also blaming Carlos Slim of Mexico, who owns some stock in the NY Times
USDA PRIME
Sunday Morning. The Sunday Morning television show on CBS just isn’t the same without Charles Osgood. I’m sorry Jane Pauley, maybe you are indeed a class act in many ways, and maybe you did get handed a tough one in following Charles, but still. Not that...
An Offense Against Man
The offense against man. Not just women. What Donald Trump has demonstrated and had revealed is a sub-culture of sociobiological behavior out of control and out of revelation……
THE FIFTH DAY SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September
Hill 110 lay quiet in the distance. I realized for the first time that I lacked a forward observer’s most important tool. A pair of binoculars. The Army had Leica German range-estimating binoculars back at Fort Sill but any pair at all would be better than bare eyes…….
THE FIFTH DAY
It wasn’t morning yet because it wasn’t light. There was no moon under the broken bamboo and soggy brush that cascaded down and over almost everything under it. I lay there, disturbed by the fact that I had lost the ability to determine if I was asleep or away……
Your Facebook Persona……
What are you writing on Facebook? Are you certain, and I mean absolutely certain, you want to be viewed in the way your are portraying to the whole world? To your family? To your friends? To your employer? To your fellow employees……….
THE FOURTH NIGHT SECOND PART
They came back like they left, only slight movements of the nearby undergrowth giving any evidence of their reappearance. Like wraiths just outside the area of my hooch, they moved to where they were already dug in, although it was mostly useless to dig holes in mud...
THE FOURTH NIGHT
Once the artillery barrage of Hill 110 was over, the surrounding low growth jungle area subsided into a windy silence. The hot air wafted, like blown cobwebs sweeping slowly back and forth across the face and body of anyone standing. I lay in my hooch, waiting. The...
THE FOURTH DAY THIRD PART
On the second day there was no meeting to plan the fake attack on Hill 110. The Gunny drifted by when the big Double Trouble CH46 lifted off from resupply, loaded with body bags, the wounded and one Marine who’d served out his time. Actually, he was six days short of...
Death of Rising Technology
There’s something missing over the past forty years, or maybe a few more. New Technology Are we witnessing the Death of Technology?
Supreme Ignorance
The politics of self-defeat in ignorance. That’s the policy of the republican Congress right now, with respect to the Supreme Court. Everything going before the current court, split down the middle by political belief 4 to 4, is coming back as a tie…..
The Coming War on Shopping, Soft Targets
When 9/11 went down, now sixteen years back, I wrote an Op/Ed about the potential for terrorists strikes at home that might occur at extremely soft targets. Those targets had the ability, if hit, to stop much of America’s commerce. Those targets, the way I saw...
Looking for Belly Button Lint
The presidency of Hilary Clinton will be initiated and confirmed in November to start in January of next year. That she will be president is not in question. How she came to be selected to be president is something else again. There can be little question now that she...
The Human Political Condition
What a shock! Donald Trump is not what he claims in another area, as some old tax documents are revealed. Yes, he’s awful, idiotic and even mentally damaged, but do not ever forget one thing that has been revealed by his successful candidacy and his potential to...
THE FOURTH DAY SECOND PART
I sat in my hooch, waiting for the sound of choppers distant in the air. I thought about all of what had gone before, since I’d arrived. It felt terrible to know I would have to sit and wait for orders to move from Hill 110, which we would not be taking, in direct violation of orders.
THE FOURTH DAY
“Love child, never meant to be. Love child, always second best.” Brother John presaged the lyrics in his deep baritone voice. A different voice introduced John without actually introducing him. Was John really in Na Trang, spinning a platter with the latest Supremes’ song on it?
THE GREAT DISAPPEARING APES
Are we the disappearing apes? Before the turn of the 20th century scientists knew what had happened to Rome and the Romans……..
THE THIRD NIGHT THIRD PART
They came before dawn. How they came was impossible to imagine. An entire reinforced Marine company, dug into low scrub with marginal cover, waited for them just where they hit. The company used the Starlight scope. The base of fire predicted to be launched from Hill...
OBAMA FINISHES, Like A Shrinking Drying Puddle.
The big debate is coming up with Clinton and Trump. At this time the right wing whacked mass media, as right wing as Trump himself and maybe just as suicidal, has Trump leading in all polls or very close.
THIRD NIGHT SECOND PART
I had heard of the RPG (rocket propelled grenade), the Russian version of America’s recoilless rifle. Basically it was a small rocket fired from a shoulder mount. The rocket body, about two inches in diameter, had a warhead about four inches. Because the weapon...
THE THIRD NIGHT
Once again, backed into the open-sided ‘lean-to’ my ‘scout’ team had made for me, I took out my writing materials to send another letter home. It was getting too dark to write so I did the best I could since using the flashlight under a hunched over poncho cover was out of the question in the heat….
More Chickenman Episodes…….
Welcome back! According to our Facebook Page comments there is a real Chickenman Fan club out there. Radio did a lot to spark the imagination of listeners. Something we may be missing as a culture today? Don’t Touch your Dial Click on Arrows below Introduction...
The Sadness of The Drudge Report
Drudge Report I have been reading the Internet Drudge Report to see what it has up on it these days, in the times of Donald Trump. I could not believe what I was reading! Fox? Nothing. Go to Drudge and be blown from any rationality to a place far far away. Donald...
Chickenman, 4 Episodes
In my series, Thirty Days Has September, the radio program Chickenman was brought to mind. Armed Forces Radio provided our troops, in the Vietnam War, the ‘opportunity” to listen to this inane and entertaining Radio series created by the genius of Dick...
THE THIRD DAY SECOND PART, 30 Days Has September
I made my way back to the Gunny. The Corpsman lay still, breathing shallowly with a poncho cover wrapped around him. The poncho covers served as our blankets, since they easily separated from the rubber liner. The air mattresses most everyone had, like mine, were...
WHAT’S REALLY REAL?
What’s Really Real?
Differential behavior when combined with verbal and written communication. The complexity of trying to arrive at conclusions about other people when limited to talk, or the written word, or even in seething them out in life, all prepared to be seen. What about under the thin layers we lay over the reality of our lives?
THE STEAMING PILE OF MASS MEDIA CRAP
Steaming Pile of Media Crap just gets bigger! They don’t care. No, they don’t. Not one whit. You think they care, because they really really sound like they care. But they don’t. People you like on television; Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, Anderson...
THE THIRD DAY, 30 Days Has September
Ham and Lima beans. Nobody wanted them so I took all four boxes. It was preferable to the sliced ‘spam’ I’d had before. The boxes had already been picked through for sugar and fake cream packets. I got a carton of cigarettes. Lucky Strike. I sat back against a big...Subscribe to FROM THE WILDERNESS
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