Eternal Patrol — An Elegy for Memorial Day, 2022
We sleep beneath the sea,
Unread last letters home,
Clutched forever
To our hearts,
Though the sea is cold,
Brotherhood,
Keeps us warm,
Don’t look for us,
We’re out here,
On patrol,
Keeping watch,
Forever.
The barn is still there; the colony has been reduced to five cats, but not just through attrition. Three of the cats came out of their shells sufficiently to charm people and got themselves adopted. I say 'got themselves adopted' because we didn’t have to place them, they managed to worm themselves into the hearts of nearby folks, and we were approached with requests to adopt. The one exception was Little Gray Kitty. One winter afternoon when I went to feed the colony, she clearly had an upper respiratory infection. I had no trouble getting her into a carrier — we had been good buddies for years. The vet prescribed a course of treatment that required me to bring her home, and she’s never left. That’s how homes accumulate cats. It just happens. Another cat, the Katzenjammer Kitty, was the big male of the colony. He decided that he wasn’t getting enough food, so he took to crossing the street each day to sit on the picnic table outside the Syria Store. There he’d get extra rations. One of the ladies decided that was unsafe; she took him home, where he has ready access to his own TV remote and a choice seat on the couch.
Dora the Therapy Cat showed up on the barn’s loading dock one afternoon. She’d either wandered in from who-knows-where, or more likely was dumped by some out of towner. That happens quite a bit in Syria. Dora was unusual. I fed her with rest of the cats, and figured to trap her ASAP to get her fixed. When I finished and headed back to the truck Dora followed me. I tried to shoo her back, but of course cats no more understand that than they understand calculus. I figured she’d go back to the colony when I drove away, but she tried to get into the truck with me. I closed the door; as I drove away, she ran about in the street, completely confused, so I came back and slipped her into the front seat, bringing her home.
No one on local social media answered my missing kitty call. Dora was young and petite, pretty, friendly, but timid. She liked to sit up on my desk, next to my ham radio gear, while I made contacts. When she got off the desk she would often look at her image in puzzlement in a floor length mirror. I would love to have kept her, but our house is small; we can’t keep every cat who comes our way. We placed her with a family that has a daughter with a chronic illness. Dora will make an excellent therapy cat. She is as sweet as they come, but not demanding.
For the Cats’ Sake showed up one morning in two cars with plenty of traps. The tall, slim woman explained to me that they used smelly fish as bait while her partner, a woman who smoked a curious pipe, unloaded the traps. She explained their organization was dedicated to Trap-Neuter-Return, all of which sounded just right to me. I wanted my cats neutered, and I wanted them back. They waded into the debris that littered the barn, placing the rickety traps here and there. “Great,” I thought, “by the time they get through clomping around in there, every cat will have scattered for the day.” I stayed back by my car to keep out of their way. Within a half hour they were going back in, and coming out with traps full of cats. These ladies knew what they were doing.
About ninety minutes, one lady walked up to me. I need you to go to this address and ask the lady for three more traps. I brought those traps back, and they filled them up too.
This was my introduction to trap-neuter-return, or TNR. They took at least half the colony away that day, kept at it, and within a few weeks there would be no more cat reproduction at my colony. I had never seen anything like it. At one point I’d been frantic — there’d be no more kittens. I loved kittens; what a nightmare. Then relief set in. The colony wouldn’t get any bigger — hopefully.
One day I came to the barn to feed. There were plenty of kittens scampering around. I placed food for the adults in the usual neat piles, then placed kitten food in its usual places. I heard screaming from somewhere deep in the barn. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but assumed another female was giving birth. I had no idea what that would sound like. This was screaming.
The next day Rose and I came to feed together. We were on our way to some function, and were pretty dressed up. The screaming was still going on. It wasn’t a female giving birth. We searched. There, in the interior of the barn, was an old Lacrosse goal. Caught in the goal’s netting, about five feet off the ground, was a rag-like figure, flailing about. It was an orange kitten with its head stuck in one of the netting holes. She was wildly waving her legs and screaming. We couldn’t touch her for all her activity. Rose ran to the Syria store to grab a scissors. I held an apple basket under the kitten while Rose cut the net, dropping the kitten into the basket. The kitten continued to thrash about in the basket; there was no way we could get that net off. We covered the basket and brought it to the local vet, who sedated her and cut off the net. The vet’s comment: “Be careful, she’s very feral.”
That kitten, thereafter named Lacrosse, ended up back at our house, where she was quickly socialized (it took about fifteen minutes), bottle fed for a bit, then integrated into our family, where she spent the rest of her life.
Lacrosse's First Day Home
I came late to cats. I did have one cat in my college apartment. Chat was a good buddy, but I was on my way into the Navy, so I had to find him a new home. I brought him to some old family friends, two aged Polish sisters living on a farm in Adamsville, Rhode Island, where he was spoiled rotten, but managed to keep his girlish figure by working as a farm cat all day.
Later I inherited a barn full of community cats, that is, no longer feral cats who interact with people on a regular basis. Judy, the postmaster had been feeding them for years. When she retired, I drew the short straw amongst the 200 or so folks in Syria, Virginia, and became their feeder. Twist my arm, this was great! There were about ten cats, who ate once a day. None were friendly enough to pet — six feet was their safe distance, but my wife and I enjoyed the effort.
Then, one day, peeking out from behind an old apple basket, was a kitten, no, three kittens. The next day there were more. The kittens were a delight. They scampered around playfully when they saw us, remaining just out of petting range, but soon we were up to nineteen felines. Cute little kittens turn into full size cats with full size appetites, who then have more kittens. At one point in the past the contract mail delivery lady had gotten all the cats spayed at her own expense. Clearly some new breeders had moved in.
We named many of our cats: One pair was Trudy and Jerry Katz, named for a couple my parents had been friends with many years ago. Both seemed to resemble their human namesakes. Then there was Mr. Big Cheeks, the male who spent his time behind the others at feeding time, just looking at the action. He in fact had very big cheeks. There was Little Big Cheeks. She was born in one of the litters after we began feeding. She had long, golden hair, and an enormous mane, making her look like a lion, and somewhat like a puffed-up mini-Mr. Big Cheeks. At first, we thought she was a male, but she was eventually revealed as a girl when she too had kittens.
We did our best to keep the cats out of the street by providing clean water as well as food, but we occasionally lost one to a traffic accident, leading to the establishment of the kitty cemetery in our yard. Each time we lost a cat I felt as if I’d lost a child.
When the barn population crept over nineteen, we decided that cute wasn’t enough. Population control was needed. At $250-$300 per cat to spay or neuter, we were way over our heads.
To be continued
Rumor is powerful, and in the Internet age it has gained more power than ever, so when a single Internet news outlet reported that US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had suggested a meeting with his Russian counterpart to discuss an armistice in Ukraine, alarm bells rang in my head. Most likely Russia had planted this rumor.
It’s not that I don’t want the killing to stop — I very much want that. An end to the killing is in Vladimir Putin’s power to achieve today, or given the apparent primitive nature of Russian military communications, perhaps tomorrow. But if the Russian Army isn’t on the run, they’re at least back on their heels. If they want peace with the country they’ve invaded, they know how to get it. They can leave.
Ukraine is a de facto US ally. We have no business calling for discussions about an armistice while Russia continues attempting to conquer the place. Russia gobbled up part of Ukraine in 2014, and built a bridge from Russia proper to its newly annexed territory. Ukraine has quite a bone to pick with Putin. Let them pick it while the picking is good.
When Russia speaks, she sounds like the old Soviet Union. Anything she doesn’t like is “a provocation.” The day after she conquered Crimea, she informed the world that “99 percent of the population had voted to unite with Russia.” It was classic Soviet propaganda out of the late 1940s when Stalin was busy installing puppet governments in Eastern Europe. And when Russia wants something to happen, she often cranks up the rumor mill. During and since the Trump administration that rumor mill has included friendly members of Congress spouting Russian propaganda. Disgusting, but that’s your new action Republican Party.
Putin may have wanted to conquer Ukraine, but an armistice in place wouldn’t be so bad for him. It would virtually cut Ukraine’s access to the sea, and solidify his justification for the war. What it wouldn’t get Putin is Ukrainian engineering expertise. Most Soviet defense engineers were Ukrainian. It shows in Russia’s inability to build things right. Did Putin really think he could annex Ukraine and enslave its engineers? How Soviet. All the good Russian engineers have emigrated.
The Ukrainians should be given the time and materials to push the Russians out, even to the point where they can blow up that bridge from Crimea to Russia.
Tangier, January, 1976. Trudy’s Piano Bar was in the heart of the city. A dark place, it had a long, hardwood bar, running the length of one wall, worn by years of patrons leaning against it to sip their drinks. In the front, to the left of the entrance were small, round tables. In the rear was the darkest corner, with a few more tables, and Trudy’s piano. Somewhere in all that was the hint of a dance floor.
Trudy had been a young concert pianist of some note in Hungary prior to World War II. She had fled the Nazis, ending up in Gibraltar, then making her way to Morocco, where she eventually opened the piano bar. It was the first place my friend took me.
The bar was open to everyone, but it was a special favorite of expatriates. I can testify to the fact that it was a wonderful place, never too crowded, always full of nice people, and above all, Trudy made it special.
Sadly, things didn’t end well. My friend who lived in Tangier told me that during the attempted coup everything was closed for quite some time in the quarter where the piano bar was located. Later it reopened. A gentleman of significant wealth came to Trudy with a proposal. Come play only for me, and be a permanent part of my life. It wasn’t the sort of thing that appealed to Trudy. Shortly thereafter she suffered a debilitating stroke, and she had no one to care for her. Taking that gentleman’s offer might have been for the best.
Everything that can be written about the United States’ socio-political situation has been written. Every idea has been thought and said and written. Each supposedly Olympian Mind has given us his and her two cents. At this point they’re just adding spare change to the mix about Roe, Ukraine, 6 January, and though Covid is out of style right now, its day may come again. Though the CDC may say that Covid might soon be treated like “the flu,” the ranks of the unvaccinated are large enough that we might yet see the hospitals overrun once more. If we don’t, well, good.
Roe, the simple code word for the abortion fight, promises to be the great divisor, the thing that finally shows the US as two separate nations. I’m not so sure. Roe is like the thunderclap that proves the storm has been here for a while. For those who haven’t been following along, in 2020 the United States barely beat back a coup attempt by the defeated outgoing president. That should be enough big news, but it’s not. It’s the historical component of what has become a civil war. It's barely even a historical component. Half the politicians and a third of the electorate can't even agree that there was a coup attempt.
Our commentators have made a cottage industry out of speculating about whether the US is entering a second civil war. They cite racists, the anti-immigrant movement, anti-LGBTQ &c. sentiment, and it goes on through the entire conservative opposition component to the full spectrum of the liberal agenda, from the harmless to the weird.
But all that is what commentators like to call the culture wars. It’s not our new civil war at all. The civil war itself is being fought post 2020 in the state legislatures and a few court rooms. If 2020 was a coup attempt to retain one man, Donald Trump, in power, the new civil war is a focused effort by the national Republican Party and its local chapters to permanently install themselves in power at all levels, by manipulating local laws to dilute non-Republican voting strength.They don't really care about Donald Trump at all. This is no small feat, as the Republican Party represents a dwindling percentage of voters, but our arcane and archaic electoral system will enable this.
The Republicans are assisted in this effort by two factors in addition to the electoral process:
Beginning in 2022, and culminating in 2024, I expect Americans to awaken the morning after election day to find they have elected a government not much to their liking, and I further expect them to find election day 2024 to be just the beginning of a long march into a near single party state unless something not currently foreseeable is done. This is not good; it is very bad. Is anyone listening?
Suddenly baby formula has joined cat food as the thing we can’t seem to find on the shelves of our stores in the land of plenty. Abbott Labs, one of the few producers of the stuff in this country, shut down their big formula plant in Michigan back in February due to contamination, and hasn’t been able to get it back on line (It’s already May, what the hell have you been doing up there in Michigan, Abbott?). As with so many industries in this country, the formula business has consolidated to only a few manufacturers, in spite of the dizzying numbers of brands, making it easy for a single failure point to create a shortage.
Suddenly the blowhards in Congress and their media horse holders are talking about the possible need for a national baby formula stockpile. Really? A National Baby Formula Stockpile? Where would we keep it? With the stockpile of PPE we don’t have for the next pandemic? Maybe with our dwindling tritium stockpile.
It didn’t have to be this way. For the last forty years, every administration has made believe that our anti-trust legislation didn’t exist. Every One. The slightest suggestion that a merger or acquisition might not be in the national interest was cause for charges of socialism, or some other anti-industry shibboleth. Cable mergers? Sure, lets scrunch ‘em all together; it’ll make for more efficiency and lead to content creation giants. It’s led to giants alright, but not to the benefit of the public. The same is true for the wireless phone industry. The beneficiaries have been the phone executives and the M&A law firms.
Anti-trust is that area of government that doesn’t get much attention until the American public begins reaping the results of its non-enforcement. That’s what’s happening right now, but the press has the attention span of a teenager, so don’t look for them to do their supposed constitutional due diligence.
It’s one thing to overturn Roe v. Wade. The decision’s author, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, was quoted as saying that it was bad law, but he didn’t care. He wanted abortion legal nationally. That’s the kind of Supreme Court over reach that ought never to happen.
The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated in a 1992 speech at New York University that Roe was bad law; abortion law should be left to the states, she said, and at most the Texas law in question should have been overturned. At the same time, I’ll bet she wouldn’t have voted to overturn Roe.
What Roe did was galvanize antiabortion people and organizations, who had not been united, into a powerful force — one much more focused on achieving their objective than the pro-abortion forces were on maintaining the status quo.
It appears that the overturning will usher in a brave new anti abortion world, a world much more restrictive, and bizarre, than the pre-Roe world. Where abortion might have been illegal before, but commonly performed, now it appears the abortion police will be watching. In many states it will be a world where government is much more concerned with, and aware of, the fetus. Perhaps we'll see fetus welfare police. They might go nicely with the voting police in Florida.
In Tennessee, any fetus conceived in the state will instantly be a citizen of that state. Accordingly, if a woman leaves the state to have an abortion, she will be a murderer, and can be so prosecuted. If a woman conceives during a one-night hotel stay in Memphis, her fetus will be a citizen of Tennessee, and she will be guilty of murder if she subsequently has an abortion in her home state. It’s not clear how this will be tracked, or how the Constitution’s Commerce Clause would pertain, though Congress has made a mockery of the Commerce Clause in the last sixty years, so presumably the Volunteer State has free play to pursue anyone it wishes.
And what of the Senators who voted to confirm certain ultra conservative justices, having asked them if they respected Roe as settled law? If they actually believed the responses they received, then they are just a great a set of fools as Susan Collins (R-ME) appears whenever she opens her mouth. The pro-choice forces had their chance, and on the weak backs, and weaker characters of Susan Collins and Claire McCaskill they failed, if ever they had a chance.
