by James Strauss |
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….
by James Strauss |
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…….
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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……
by James Strauss |
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…….
by James Strauss |
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……
by James Strauss |
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……….
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
There’s something missing over the past forty years, or maybe a few more. New Technology Are we witnessing the Death of Technology?
by James Strauss |
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…..
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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.
by James Strauss |
“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?
by James Strauss |
Are we the disappearing apes? Before the turn of the 20th century scientists knew what had happened to Rome and the Romans……..
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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.
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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….
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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?
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
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...
by James Strauss |
The radio music transmissions were supposed to stop at night but it was not full dark when my small team of scouts and radio operator went to work setting up shelter halves around them. I was afraid of the radio transmissions giving our position away. I smelled heavy...
by James Strauss |
I WILL NOT! I will not drop friends on Facebook or visitors to my websites because they support Donald Trump or say shitty things about Hillary Clinton. I just won’t do it. Without differences what a helluva boring world it would be and what a pit of dead creativity.
by James Strauss |
It was interesting to listen to so many people interviewed this morning on ABC about why they support Donald Trump. Some are irrational to a great extent, like the woman who’s selling Confederate flags with Trumps name on them, even though Trump has disavowed...
by James Strauss |
And the mass media rush to rid the country of being a country continues. The wealthy owners of these media outlets report on how the big national defense ‘whatever the hell that was’ event where Clinton and Trump spoke, was all about how both of them made...
by James Strauss |
Night didn’t come easily in the Nam. The day had been a blessing compared to my first night. Moving seventeen clicks through muddy rice paddies wearing a fifty-pound pack was its own form of misery, but the brutality of Marine training had kicked in and setting one...
by James Strauss |
There are no more ‘facts’ left to report, not if you read the Drudge Report or watch Fox News. They say whatever they want now, with complete impunity.
by James Strauss |
And they all become the same.
From Facebook, Twitter Instagram, Snapchat and more. They all become all about them and not about you
by James Strauss |
The distancing of technology and what it means for tribalism and the very survival of the human race.
We cannot make it apart. We live among one another, using one another……….
by James Strauss |
THE SECOND DAY SECOND PART Breakfast in the mud pit was ham and lima beans served with canteen cup holders of instant black coffee. I didn’t ask the Gunny why the other men bothered to pull the cream and sugar from incoming C-rations. It didn’t matter. I remained so...
by James Strauss |
The “Goring” of Hillary Clinton. That’s exactly what the republican owned Mainstream Media is doing. They are doing to her, damning by faint praise, exactly what they did to give the nation eight years of George Bush Junior, creating the single...
by James Strauss |
There are people who don’t agree. In fact, that statement “don’t agree” might best describe this United States of America. It’s a nation of don’t agree, a land of different beliefs and a country where argument reigns……..
by James Strauss |
This thing about pain. Not heroin. Not opiates. I mean real pain. The kind of pain that reaches down inside you and the radiates out so you can’t even communicate properly. Yes, that mewling stuff reducing your from a human being to flopping piece of chicken meat……..
by James Strauss |
Hieronymus Six a.m. comes early in Duluth, Minnesota, when February, the coldest month of a cold winter, begins. It was the first and it was a Saturday morning. I lived in a four story home built by some important person many years earlier. There’d been enough time...
by James Strauss |
I could not believe I was flying into my first field experience wearing crummy Korean War utilities. I wished fervently that I’d brought my own from training. At least they would have been green instead of whatever color I now wore. Being colorblind as a Marine...
by James Strauss |
What can we do to feel better about ourselves and about life going on around us, no matter who we are and where we are or what is happening to us? A rare thing to do is thought. Isolated, individual, lonely and very necessary private thought. You can do it anywhere...
by James Strauss |
The blithering drooling and vapid delivery of American television pounds most of us into some sort of lumpy grumpy submission. News bastions from Fox, to CNN and on into MSNBC and the networks bombard us with solid right hooks from Trump and dancing jabs from Clinton until we all feel like either battered survivors
by James Strauss |
I followed the Buck Sergeant down through the dark muddy aisle of the Da Nang Hilton. The aisle was strewn with back packs and other field equipment I could not help running into. My flight bag was tucked under the bunk, for whatever security that might provide.
by James Strauss |
I get tired of it. The constant drone about the human over population of our world and how our actions are bringing it to an end. Has most of the world forgotten about basic math and geometry? Or didn’t most of the world go to school? Most of the world I experience...
by James Strauss |
The door opened. It was a steel door about six inches thick, or so it seemed. It hit with a jarring thud when its heavy flat surface pivoted down and smacked upon the mud. Sunlight shot in like a wave of heat, followed by a wave of real heat, the air-conditioned...
by James Strauss |
What is the Alt-right, anyway? The alternative right wing, once known as neocons but alt-right sounds mysteriously better. They are republicans, the most fearful of all republicans. Republicans have a single commonality about them that extends to the alt-right, as...
by James Strauss |
Back when I had to get up in the morning. Now I get up in the morning because I can’t even remember what it was that I got out of sleeping in.
Back then my brilliant wife was in control of the stereo, a stereo capable of blowing anyone and anything out of our small one story home
by James Strauss |
There will be no getting together. Of all social fears that exist on the planet, for cultural leaders, people getting together is their greatest fear. Today, with the advent of such magnificent electronic media inventions…..
by James Strauss |
The hall outside the St. Norbert Chemistry Department classroom door saw a lot of traffic. The dark, near ebony, wood and solid stone floor that ran the length of the narrow passage exuded age and class. Student’s passing all did so in silence, carrying piles of...
by James Strauss |
Fifth grade at Sacred Heart Academy in Duluth, Minnesota wasn’t much different than other Catholic Elementary Schools of its time, except for its location high atop a hill above one of the coldest developed areas in the United States. Other places in Minnesota might...
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