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Awww, Sonofabitch, It’s Dusty in Here…

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I just ran across something at Reddit most of you probably already have read, but I’m going to copy it here with attribution because I want to archive it myself.  It’s titled In the final minutes of his life, Calvin has one last talk with Hobbes, by Redditor “Samuraitiger19.”

“Calvin? Calvin, sweetheart?”

In the darkness Calvin heard the sound of Susie, his wife of fifty-three years. Calvin struggled to open his eyes. God, he was so tired and it took so much strength. Slowly, light replaced the darkness, and soon vision followed. At the foot of his bed stood his wife. Calvin wet his dry lips and spoke hoarsely, “Did… did you…. find him?”

“Yes dear,” Susie said smiling sadly, “He was in the attic.”

Susie reached into her big purse and brought out a soft, old, orange tiger doll. Calvin could not help but laugh. It had been so long. Too long.

“I washed him for you,” Susie said, her voice cracking a little as she laid the stuffed tiger next to her husband.

“Thank you, Susie.” Calvin said.

A few moments passed as Calvin just laid on his hospital bed, his head turned to the side, staring at the old toy with nostalgia.

“Dear,” Calvin said finally. “Would you mind leaving me alone with Hobbes for a while? I would like to catch up with him.”

“All right,” Susie said. “I’ll get something to eat in the cafeteria. I’ll be back soon.”

Susie kissed her huband on the forehead and turned to leave. With sudden but gentle strength Calvin stopped her. Lovingly he pulled his wife in and gave her a passionate kiss on the lips. “I love you,” he said.

“And I love you,” said Susie.

Susie turned and left. Calvin saw tears streaming from her face as she went out the door.

Calvin then turned to face his oldest and dearest friend. “Hello Hobbes. It’s been a long time hasn’t it old pal?”

Hobbes was no longer a stuffed doll but the big furry old tiger Calvin had always remembered. “It sure has, Calvin.” said Hobbes.

“You… haven’t changed a bit.” Calvin smiled.

“You’ve changed a lot.” Hobbes said sadly.

Calvin laughed, “Really? I haven’t noticed at all.”

There was a long pause. The sound of a clock ticking away the seconds rang throughout the sterile hospital room.

“So… you married Susie Derkins.” Hobbes said, finally smiling. “I knew you always like her.”

“Shut up!” Calvin said, his smile bigger than ever.

“Tell me everything I missed. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to!” Hobbes said, excited.  And so Calvin told him everything. He told him about how he and Susie fell in love in high school and had married after graduating from college, about his three kids and four grandkids, how he turned Spaceman Spiff into one of the most popular sci-fi novels of the decade, and so on. After he told Hobbes all this there was another pregnant pause.

“You know… I visited you in the attic a bunch of times.” Calvin said.

“I know.”

“But I couldn’t see you. All I saw was a stuffed animal.” Calvin voice was breaking and tears of regret started welling up in his eyes.

“You grew up old buddy.” said Hobbes.

Calvin broke down and sobbed, hugging his best friend. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry I broke my promise! I promised I wouldn’t grow up and that we’d be together forever!!”

Hobbes stroke the Calvin’s hair, or what little was left of it. “But you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were always together… in our dreams.”

“We were?”

“We were.”

“Hobbes?”

“Yeah, old buddy?”

“I’m so glad I got to see you like this… one last time…”

“Me too, Calvin. Me too.”

“Sweetheart?” Susie voice came from outside the door.

“Yes dear?” Calvin replied.

“Can I come in?” Susie asked.

“Just a minute.”  Calvin turned to face Hobbes one last time. “Goodbye Hobbes. Thanks… for everything…”

“No, thank you Calvin.” Hobbes said.

Calvin turned back to the door and said, “You can come in now.”

Susie came in and said, “Look who’s come to visit you.”

Calvin’s children and grandchildren followed Susie into Calvin’s room. The youngest grandchild ran past the rest of them and hugged Calvin in a hard, excited hug. “Grandpa!!” screamed the child in delight.

“Francis!” cried Calvin’s daughter, “Be gentle with your grandfather.”

Calvin’s daughter turned to her dad. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Francis never seems to behave these days. He just runs around making a mess and coming up with strange stories.”

Calvin laughed and said, “Well now! That sound just like me when I was his age.”
Calvin and his family chatted some more until a nurse said, “Sorry, but visiting hours are almost up.”  Calvin’s beloved family said good bye and promised to visit tomorrow. As they turned to leave Calvin said, “Francis. Come here for a second.”

Francis came over to his grandfather’s side, “What is it Gramps?”

Calvin reached over to the stuffed tiger on his bedside and and held him out shakily to his grandson, who looked exactly as he did so many years ago. “This is Hobbes. He was my best friend when I was your age. I want you to have him.”

“He’s just a stuffed tiger.” Francis said, eyebrows raised.

Calvin laughed, “Well, let me tell you a secret.”  Francis leaned closer to Calvin. Calvin whispered, “If you catch him in a tiger trap using a tuna sandwich as bait he will turn into a real tiger.”

Francis gasped in delighted awe. Calvin continued, “Not only that he will be your best friend forever.”

“Wow! Thanks grandpa!” Francis said, hugging his grandpa tightly again.

“Francis! We need to go now!” Calvin’s daughter called.

“Okay!” Francis shouted back.

“Take good care of him.” Calvin said.

“I will.” Francis said before running off after the rest of the family.

Calvin laid on his back and stared at the ceiling. The time to go was close. He could feel it in his soul. Calvin tried to remember a quote he read in a book once. It said something about death being the next great adventure or something like that. He eyelids grew heavy and his breathing slowed. As he went deeper into his final sleep he heard Hobbes, as if he was right next to him at his bedside. “I’ll take care of him, Calvin…”

Calvin took his first step toward one more adventure and breathed his last with a grin on his face.

Just. Damn.

Blogorado Bound

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I attended Gun Blogger Rendezvous 1 – 10, only missing the last one so I could attend Boomershoot again. Unfortunately it really was the last one, but that means I have vacation time (and money) to allow me to attend another gathering of The People of the Gun™ that I have had to miss in prior years – Blogorado.

Blogorado is an invitation-only gathering of the Clan held in an undisclosed location in Colorado, attended by a glittering list of blog-writers, their spouses (often bloggers themselves) and sometimes their families.  It is held on the ranch of Farmgirl, Farmmom, and Farmdad.  Motel reservations are made, vacation time has been requested, and now I just have to choose what portion of my arsenal will be making the trip North and East with me.

I’m really looking forward to seeing several people I haven’t seen in meatspace in years, and meeting new people I haven’t had a chance to meet before.

For me, this is the best part of blogging – friends you never knew you had.  As Breda Fallon once said in an episode of the podcast Vicious Circle:

I’m one of those people – I like people, I’m personable, but I don’t really have “friends” friends, because I just don’t connect to people really that well. But then blogs happened, and I found a whole group of people that I fit in with because I’m weird and they’re weird in kinda the same way, and yea for our mutual weirdness. So, thank you for being weird with me.

The Well-Regulated Militia

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Meet the Cajun Navy:

“They can handle their boats better than the average fireman, who handles a boat once a year during annual training,” says Lt. General (ret.) Russel Honore, who estimates outdoorsmen saved 10,000 from floodwaters in New Orleans while he was in command there after Hurricane Katrina. “They use their boats all the time and know their waters, and know their capacity. It’s an old professional pride. It’s like good food: Some people didn’t go to the Cordon Bleu, but they can cook like hell. That’s these fishermen and their boats.”

Buster Stoker, 21, is a heavy equipment operator for R&R Construction in Sulphur, La., and spends the rest of his time in his 17-foot aluminum Pro Drive marsh boat, fishing for alligator-gar in the heat of summer and chasing fowl through water-thickets in the winter.

“The best day on the water is every day on the water,” he said.

He and several other construction colleagues met in the company parking lot Monday morning at 5 a.m., loaded up with gas and supplies, and headed toward Houston. They launched their little fleet of 14 craft from the intersection of Highway 90 and 526, and over the next several hours they pulled hundreds of people out of their flooded homes in subdivisions, hauling them aboard like gasping bass.

This Cajun Navy is a nebulous, informal thing. It has no real corps or officers. It’s “an intensely informal and unorganized operation,” says Academy Award-winning filmmaker Allan Durand, a Lafayette, La., native., who did a documentary on the “Cajun Navy” volunteer-boats following Katrina.

It’s a movement basically founded on the realization that large government agencies aren’t quick-moving.

According to Honore, they have become utterly essential.

“The first-responders aren’t big enough to do this,” he said. “You might have a police force of 3,000, and maybe 200 know how to handle a boat.”

And that’s a citizen militia.

ETA:  Watch this.

Further update:  Read this.

Quote of the Day – Thomas Sowell Redux

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In keeping with the previous post, this from Thomas Sowell’s Townhall January 2013 piece, The Role of Educators:

Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.

John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.

A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.

If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers’ attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn’s book.

That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. But this book is one of many things that enable teachers to think of themselves as “agents of change,” without having the slightest accountability for whether that change turns out to be for the better or for the worse — or, indeed, utterly catastrophic.

Indoctrination

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I came across this the other day – the syllabus for a University of Arizona “Honors” English class, English 109H – in fact, the syllabus states:

This is an honors class with work and credit equivalent to a year’s completion of ENGL 101 and 102. Expectations are high.

This is a class for incoming Honors freshmen, straight out of high school.

Shakespeare? Milton? (*shudder*) Conrad?

Nope:

English 109H: Fall 2017

DAMN, We Will Never Know: Kendrick Lamar’s and Kiese Laymon’s Hip Hop Literacies

Course Description

Morally, there has been no change at all, and a moral change is the only real one.
–James Baldwin
On April 14, 2017, twenty-nine year-old Kendrick Lamar, an American hip hop artist known for his pop protest music, released his fourth studio album, DAMN. Four years earlier, thirty-eight year-old Kiese Laymon, an American writer known for his work on Gawker and ESPN, published his series of autobiographical essays on American racism, masculinity, hip hop, and the deep South.

Using Laymon’s essays as a framework, we will study Kendrick Lamar’s body of music to events which boomed his controversy, including #BlackLivesMatter and ongoing police brutalities, especially those publicized by social media. By studying American values connected to what we call blackness and whiteness, we’ll explore conflict, contact, and coalition and ask: How does black American and white American social media allow for critiques of race, gender, sexuality, and violence? What does it mean for a genre of music and its accompanying culture that, by “tradition,” enforces heterosexuality and masculinity—in the name of legal murders?

The goal of this course is to improve your ability to critically think and write. In addition to contextualizing and reshaping the Kendrick Lamar and Kiese Laymon conversations, you will conduct library and field research on your own controversy, which will be integrated into a semester-long project consisting of a research essay, public argument, and literacy narrative. If we can listen and read carefully enough, we can occupy other subjectivities; that is, to say, we can improve our writings and civic lives, which are connected to what happens outside the classroom. We will return to the same question at the end: Can we really act as witness to another voice, even for our studies of language and its adaptations?

Course GoalsGoal 1: Rhetorical Awareness
Learn strategies for analyzing texts’ audiences, purposes, and contexts as a means of developing facility in reading and writing.

Goal 2: Critical Thinking and Composing
Use reading and writing for purposes of critical thinking, research, problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities.

Goal 3: Reflection and Revision
Understand composing processes as flexible and collaborative, drawing upon multiple strategies and informed by reflection.

Goal 4: Conventions
Understand conventions as related to purpose, audience, and genre, including such areas as mechanics, usage, citation practices, as well as structure, style, graphics, and design.

Written Assignments

  • In the first unit of the course, you will study and respond to various contexts according to different rhetorical lenses and write a Contextual Rhetorical Analysis of Public Protest Spaces reframing Black lives politics re-envisioned by music videos from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. You may defend, depart from, or combine his arguments to develop your own inquiry.
  • In the second unit, you will conduct both library and field research on an approved social justice controversy of your choice, which will culminate in an analysis of the issue, or a Rhetorical Analysis of a Controversy. An Annotated Bibliography, due before the big Essay 2, will complete the “Research Portfolio.” You will closely study U.S. state or Supreme court cases to develop your controversies.
  • In the third unit, you will use this research to support an argument of public interest, called a Public Argument. You will create a video catered to a mobilized audience and present it to the class.
  • For the final “exam,” you will write and curate your own literacy narrative, which you will publish on a class blog. The final project is semester-long and we will NOT spend time in class on it other than one session per month; you are expected to develop, collect, and write your materials throughout the course. Please start early and utilize the class resources and office hours.
  • In addition to these larger projects, you will complete a series of in-class and out-of-class smaller assignments which build into the four major assignments. Homework (readings, journals, smaller pre-essay assignments and discussions), workshops, and participation are often the decisive suasion points for borderline grades. Do the work, come to class ready and willing to discuss and participate, and you will see that reflected in what you earn.

I’m not going to go through the rest of it, but here’s an example of Kendrick Lamar’s art from his album DAMN:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glaG64Ao7sM?list=PLxKHVMqMZqUTMHeEmiAn8uylx3W_u8KI5&showinfo=0]
I’m reminded of this national championship debate performance.

Just saying.

Kiese Laymon’s collection of essays How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a required textbook.

At least there’s a textbook.  The title essay is still available at Gawker.  It’s prose, but I’m unconvinced that what’s being taught in this class is “critical thinking” or “structure, style, graphics and design.”  And since when is the purpose of an English class “problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities”?

Oh, and remember we’re paying (a lot) for our kids to go to college for this.

The professor?  Sylvia Chan.

The Long March through the Institutions has been completed for a long, long time.

Oh, and read this QotD too.  It’s pertinent.

Edited to add this I found at a linking site:

Right-Wing Media

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I just got introduced to IntellectualFroglegs.com by a video over at American Digest.  The video is on YouTube – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goolag – er, Google:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI3kVAkyelI?rel=0&showinfo=0]
Watch that, if for no other reason than to appreciate the content creator’s real mastery of the multimedia format.

If you had told me six years ago that the American Left would be self-destructing as rapidly and violently as they appear to be today, I’d have had you committed.  But bear in mind, their “long march through the institutions” has secured their (ever more tenuous) grasp on the reins of power.  They own academia, the media, and the entertainment industry almost completely, and that’s still a lot of power, power they won’t surrender easily.