In his own interpretation:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx9–zQDfog?rel=0]
“That America will return one day, I know it will.”
Received, again, via email. My thanks to Dave.
Old Aviators and Old Airplanes….
This is a good little story about a vivid memory of a P-51 and its pilot, by a fellow who was 12 years old in Canada in 1967. It was to take to the air. They said it had flown in during the night from some U.S. Airport, the pilot had been tired.
I marveled at the size of the plane dwarfing the Pipers and Canucks tied down by her. It was much larger than in the movies. She glistened in the sun like a bulwark of security from days gone by.
The pilot arrived by cab, paid the driver, and then stepped into the pilot’s lounge. He was an older man; his wavy hair was gray and tossed. It looked like it might have been combed, say, around the turn of the century. His flight jacket was checked, creased and worn – it smelled old and genuine. Old Glory was prominently sewn to its shoulders. He projected a quiet air of proficiency and pride devoid of arrogance. He filed a quick flight plan to Montreal (Expo-67, Air Show) then walked across the tarmac.
After taking several minutes to perform his walk-around check the pilot returned to the flight lounge to ask if anyone would be available to stand by with fire extinguishers while he “flashed the old bird up, just to be safe.”
Though only 12 at the time I was allowed to stand by with an extinguisher after brief instruction on its use — “If you see a fire, point, then pull this lever!” I later became a firefighter, but that’s another story. The air around the exhaust manifolds shimmered like a mirror from fuel fumes as the huge prop started to rotate. One manifold, then another, and yet another barked — I stepped back with the others. In moments the Packard-built Merlin engine came to life with a thunderous roar, blue flames knifed from her manifolds. I looked at the others’ faces, there was no concern. I lowered the bell of my extinguisher. One of the guys signaled to walk back to the lounge. We did.
Several minutes later we could hear the pilot doing his pre flight run-up. He’d taxied to the end of runway 19, out of sight. All went quiet for several seconds; we raced from the lounge to the second story deck to see if we could catch a glimpse of the P-51 as she started down the runway. We could not. There we stood, eyes fixed to a spot half way down 19. Then a roar ripped across the field, much louder than before, like a furious hell spawn set loose—something mighty this way was coming. “Listen to that thing!” said the controller.
In seconds the Mustang burst into our line of sight. Its tail was already off and it was moving faster than anything I’d ever seen by that point on 19. Two-thirds the way down 19 the Mustang was airborne with her gear going up. The prop tips were supersonic; we clasped our ears as the Mustang climbed hellish fast into the circuit to be eaten up by the dog-day haze.
We stood for a few moments in stunned silence trying to digest what we’d just seen. The radio controller rushed by me to the radio. “Kingston tower calling Mustang?” He looked back to us as he waited for an acknowledgment.
The radio crackled, “Go ahead Kingston.”
“Roger Mustang. Kingston tower would like to advise the circuit is clear for a low level pass.” I stood in shock because the controller had, more or less, just asked the pilot to return for an impromptu air show!
The controller looked at us. “What?” he asked. “I can’t let that guy go without asking. I couldn’t forgive myself!”
The radio crackled once again, Kingston, do I have permission for a low level pass, east to west, across the field?”
“Roger Mustang, the circuit is clear for an east to west pass.”
“Roger, Kingston, I’m coming out of 3000 feet, stand by.”
We rushed back onto the second-story deck, eyes fixed toward the eastern haze. The sound was subtle at first, a high-pitched whine, a muffled screech, a distant scream.
Moments later the P-51 burst through the haze. Her airframe straining against positive Gs and gravity, wing tips spilling contrails of condensed air, prop-tips again supersonic as the burnished bird blasted across the eastern margin of the field shredding and tearing the air.
At about 500 mph and 150 yards from where we stood she passed with the old American pilot saluting. Imagine. A salute! I felt like laughing, I felt like crying, she glistened, she screamed, the building shook, my heart pounded.
Then the old pilot pulled her up and rolled, and rolled, and rolled out of sight into the broken clouds and indelibly into my memory. I’ve never wanted to be an American more than on that day. It was a time when many nations in the world looked to America as their big brother, a steady and even-handed beacon of security who navigated difficult political water with grace and style; not unlike the pilot who’d just flown into my memory. He was proud, not arrogant, humble, not a braggart, old and honest, projecting an aura of America at its best. That America will return one day, I know it will. Until that time, I’ll just send off this story; call it a reciprocal salute, to the old American pilot who wove a memory for a young Canadian that’s lasted a lifetime.
I know we still retain the possibility to be again what we once were, but I’m afraid that entropy will win in the end. The culture of a nation reflects the philosophy of that nation, and ours is no longer that of John Locke and Adam Smith, but rather Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, when it isn’t just “…a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown” as Ayn Rand put it.
If you didn’t mist up a little when reading that story, you may be who I’m talking about.
“That America will return one day….
I sure hope so.
Quote of the Day – “You’re the MAN Now!” Edition
From a comment over at Joe’s:
Note that those on the far Left have the delusion that they are besieged, when in fact they control the state, they control the vast civil service bureaucracies, they control the news and entertainment media that force the rest of us to swim in a sea of agitprop all our lives.
They tell themselves that they want to “speak truth to power,” but in fact they speak power to truth, all day, every day.
Anonymous
And on this holiday, may we be truly thankful for all we shall be receiving over the next few years….
Bill Whittle for President
Via Insty.
Short version:
Long version:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuL41ohlfZY?rel=0&w=640&h=360]
Too late, I fear. Far too late.
Quote of the Day – Curmudgeon Edition
From Adaptive Curmudgeon:
The arc of history is not always upward and onward. Sometimes it stagnates. I don’t like the merest hint that I might be in a period of stagnation. But sometimes it looks like it may be coming. People without adequate technology to program PacMan flew to the moon. They flew to the moon with sliderules! Decades later I can have satellite TV but we collectively lost our shit and never went to the moon again. Yes to “Bridezilla TV” but no to “space, the final frontier”? Really? Why?
On a smaller scale I’ve seen computers pop up everywhere but simultaneously dumb themselves down. I used to meet geezers that had never seen a mouse and I found that understandable. Now I meet kids who have never been without a smart phone that can call Hong Kong, yet they can’t swap their own batteries or understand where they’ve saved a file. I find that reprehensible.
I don’t like sliding backwards. I was promised hovercars and space flight, I got Twitter and Starbucks. I demand a recount!
RTWT, and watch the video.
A Little Levity
From my favorite Merchant O’Death:
National Ammo Day
I missed it by a day, but I put in an order today for 200 rounds of Federal Premium 168 grain .308 Match, and 200 rounds of 175 grain 7.62×51 Match. That ought to cover it. And it should let me test the accuracy capabilities of my 700 5R and my M25 (I hope).
We’ll see if this stuff shoots any better than my handloads, anyway.
Oh, and I also ordered a single-set trigger for the Remington a couple of days ago. We’ll see if THAT helps reduce group size any, too! At some point I’d like to be capable of hitting paintballs consistently at 200 yards with either rifle.
Quote of the Day
Brilliant observation.
ETA: First it was a melting pot. Then it was a salad bowl, separate but intermingled. NOW it’s a centrifuge.
Step 1: Eliminate the Debt Ceiling
Geithner on eliminating the debt ceiling:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Can’t run up a billion TRILLION extra dollars in debt every nine months if there’s a ceiling on what the .gov can borrow print. And opposing this insanity is “a tool for political advantage.” Check.
ETA:
Tribalism
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address – November 19, 1863
It took another hundred and fifty years, but that nation, so conceived and so dedicated, no longer endures.
UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson, Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims – Excerpt:
Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted — and Obama operatives have rejoiced in — a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound. Republicans, then, better get with the new tribalism and remarket themselves to address the new minority monolith.
Accordingly, the enlightened and redeemable liberal elements of the otherwise now played-out old white majority, when combined with the new ethnic minorities, will result in a permanent progressive majority — one that rejects the archaic, if not toxic, racialist values that have been in the past so injurious to the idea of what the United States might have otherwise become. Just imagine a better world with no more required reading of white male Greeks, no more inordinate focus on Shakespeare’s Shylock, no need to suffer through Twain’s N-word or Tolkien’s stereotypical dark-skinned orcs — or indeed, the one-dimensional and boring world we inherited from a Jefferson, Madison, Melville, Lincoln, Grant, Edison, Bell, TR, Salk, Nimitz, and Ike.
You Are a Nobody without Your Tribe
Yet the new emphasis on tribe is not necessarily a liberal vision. It ignores all human individuality and assumes that friendships, marriages, and alliances will not dare trump racial and ethic solidarity. Ours is now instead a Galadriel’s mirror of the Balkans, of India’s castes, of Rwanda, but no longer of a multiracial melting-pot America, where our allegiances were to be political, economic, and cultural and not necessarily synonymous with how we looked.
RTWT.