A story of no p'tic'lar consequence...

Now, I want to tell you a story. It’s a true story, more or less, but I’m telling it from mem’ry and it happened away back in 1957.

In 1957, I happened to be in Naha, Okinawa and this is the locale of the story.

Back in those days, in Okinawa, there was this communist fella named (I think) Kamejiro Senaga. And Senaga was a natural born politician who wanted to be Mayor of Naha which at that time and place was the most important civilian position on the island seeing as how Okinawa was under the military control of the United States.

As you might suspect, the military government didn’t have a whole lot of use for Senaga. As a matter of fact, he had been kicked off the island a number of times. Kind’a ridiculous when you think about it because he was, after all, Okinawan and had a perfect right to be there.

But he was an avowed communist and we didn’t like communists back in those days so the military government would have him arrested and put on a plane to Japan.

Problem was, he wouldn’t stay in Japan. He kept coming back to his home in Okinawa. Not too unreasonable but my guess is that the whole thing had a lot to do with viewpoint.  His versus the United States military government.

So, now that you’ve had a little bit of history, much as I c’n recall anyway, on with the tale…

Seems that Mr. Senaga was back on the island, driving around in his 1950 black Cadilac sedan (actually being driven becuz Mr. Senaga was far too important to drive his own self)…he was giving Yankee go home speeches all ‘round the island ’n the crowds were getting bigger and louder and I figured that after this speech in Naha, he was going to be escorted off the island again. 

My Bakersfield buddy and I were lounging around in the neighboring village of Naminoue (that was one of the things that we did well) in our way too short kimonos ’n drinking rice beer and flirting with the girls who were all big fans of Mr Senaga and wanted to go attend the Yankee go home demostration…

Made perfect sense that we went to the celebration. In our way too short kimonos and rubber shower shoes and yelled“Yankee, go home”with as much gusto as we could muster…

It seems that Airman Harkins ’n me were the only Americans attending and so it was that we found ourselves at an after rally party being plied with sake and rice beer with lots of grins and back-slapping and our picture took with Mr. Senaga…

I believe the most salient fact of that p’ticklar party, at least for Airman Harkins ’n me was that the licquor wa free…at least to us…all part of that perfect sense thing that I mentioned before. I supposed it was a communist thing and we were appreciative of that fact since neither one of us gave a hoot in Hell if the Okinawans had a communist government or not as it didn’t apply to either one of us.

HOW SUM EVER~~and whenever and wherever booze flows freely, there is always a howsumever that appears in the equation…

As you might imagine, at a Yankee go home rally, there is a lot of anti-American talk, a lot of yelling and shaking of fists and stuff like that…and at the after-rally party, as the booze flowed freely, they ramped up the rhetoric…(Let me point out here that it was not Mr Senaga who ramped it up as he left fairly early for his upcoming flight to Japan courtesy of the American military government)…No, it was our hosts, our newly acquired friends that Airman Harkins and I began to find a little on the rude side…so we told them that…

Well, the Japanese (’n the Okinawans are basically Japanese) are an extremely polite people, sort of like in the American south and being seen to be rude is a big no no for them and they almost immediately began to apologize, saying that they liked us, they just didn’t like Americans and me and Harkins explained that we were Americans and we went back and forth and round and round until somehow we got it all figured out and shook hands all around and they told us “Yall come back now, you hear!”(which I explained to Bakersfield born Airman Harkins was sort of a polite lie and they didn’t want us to come back at all) and Airman Harkins and me grabbed on to a couple bottles of rice beer and made our way back to the muddy streets of Naminoue (well, they were muddy streets back then)…

“BUT THEY’RE NAZI’S!”

The rallying cry of the Socialist Democrats in their attempt to muster support among the under-employed who have the time to ‘take to the streets’ to make their displeasure known to those Americans who still work and pay taxes to support the elitist protestors.

But, the truth is that they are not Nazi’s…they call themselves ’Neo-Nazi’s’ for a reason. Because the real-life Nazi’s died in 1945 with the death of Adolf Hitler. And his followers, for the most part, after the Nuremberg trials. Those few who escaped were hunted down and arrested, basically by the Jews that they hated.

The Neo-Nazi’s, the Skinheads…they’re not real Nazi’s except by the most ridiculous stretch of their juvenile imagination. They seem basically to be disaffected children seeking attention.  And they got it.  Not from the adults of the world who  had sense enough to ignore their tantrums, but from the Socialist Democrat activists who see in them the opportunity to push their very own fascistic ideals with the aid of a very compliant media. 

There are multiple motorcycle gangs in California alone that have a larger membership than any group of Neo-Nazi’s.  All the attention that is being brought by the complicit media might raise their numbers a little, much as the more attention that ISIS gets seems to bring the disaffected out of their parents bedrooms, but they’re never going to be a real force here or elsewhere.

The danger to this country doesn’t come from Neo-Nazi’s and it doesn’t come from politicians and it certainly doesn’t come from our present or any other President.  The danger comes if we listen to those Socialist Democrats and abandon our capitalistic Republic to become a welfare state. 

We need only to look at the past to see the future and in the past, there has never been a successful socialist state.  “Ecept for Sweden” crowed one of my uber liberal friends, to which I replied, Well, only until they run out of other peoples money, that is..

Justin Other Smith

Searchin' ever' whichaway...

I’ve heard a lot of liberals say that the United States is rife with institutionalized racism…but I’ve looked and I can’t find any…

They say that women have a ‘glass ceiling’ that keeps them from being equal with men…but, I’ve looked ’n I swear I don’t think that’s true but then I’m a guy and glass is glass and it may be that I just looked right through it…

They say that when companies hire people, first they hire white men, then they hire white women, then they hire asian men followed by asian women…and after that, the latinos and lastly, when pressed they’ll hire a black woman over a black man…

That’s what they tell me…

I don’t believe that either.

A few years ago, the liberals told us that ‘black’ men and women needed affirmative action in order to compete in the workplace. They tell us that we’re all equal but that somehow blacks need a head start in the race to the top. I think that’s just deep-dyed in the wool racism so I don’t think I believe that either.

Liberals tell us that conservatives are haters and that there are all these secret societies of haters like the KKK who  hide behind white bedsheets…well, except for their Grand Poobahs who hide theirselves behind scarlet red bedsheets…and they are the real haters especially of black people…and Jewish people…and Mexicans, I guess….

And here lately I’ve been hearing about all the Nazi groups, the skinheads, a bunch of jack-booted thugs who basically hate everyone who ain’t aryan white…they’re a secret society and nobody can join unless you happen to be an aryan white person…I’m told that tattoo’s are not mandatory but that may just be a story…

These are secret societies and they’re probably among us every day, in plain sight…might even be driving the Prius next to you masquerading as a liberal…

There seems to be an awful lot of things that liberals tell us that, when you check them out, don’t seem to be true. If you happen to mention that to a liberal, they will immediately start calling conservatives liars… 

And if you say, well that ain’t really the point I was trying to make, all of a sudden you become a racist, a bigot, a homophone, a xenophobe, maybe even a hydrophobe…do they have maxiphobes and miniphobes or am I just wandering around in my head again…

I saw this woman on television the other day…she looked and acted like a 40 something cheerleader and she was really proud of the fact that she’d evidently got all these people to dress in purple and hold hands and form a human chain the length of the Bay Bridge…she was smiling ear to ear and about to jump out of her skin with joy and she said the idea for the purple came to  her because Hillary Clinton wore purple when she ceded the election to Donald Trump…

And then on the very same television, I saw a group of women with pussycat hats on their heads except they were calling them ‘pussy’ hats because ten years or so ago, Donald Trump had made a joking remark in a private conversation about grabbing women by the pussy…  

Now, I ain’t saying he didn’t make the remark. It’s pretty dumb but men do get really dumb sometimes, especially when it comes to women, and to be truthful, I’ve heard women make remarks every bit as dumb…as an aside, my personal experience is that women are much more graphic in their conversations about sex than men. Men, for the most part, seem to have a very limited vocabulary. Women in conversation with other women don’t seem to have a vocabulary problem. But, I guess that’s another story…

So what we had is the biggest damn demonstration in history…hundreds of millions of women in countries around the world demostrating…standing in solidarity with their sisters…demanding…uh, something…I don’t know what they were demanding…different things for different women, I suppose…television analysts are voicing some really deep opinions…well, deep for television analysts, sage people, these television talking heads…Me, I’m kind’a dumb, I guess so I’ll just do what I always do, scratch my head and open a beer and stay out of the way…it ain’t healthy to get sideways of one woman let alone several hundred million of them…

These have been sage words of advice from Justin Other Smith

Whoa!
Justin Other Smith

When my daddy, Manuel Smith, first started telling me this story, he said he wuz about 16 years old but over the years, he seemed to get younger ‘most ever time he told it ’n the last time, he said he wuz 12 year old ’n they all lived on the farm out on Leatherwood.  All, being my grandparents, John Sam ’n Nora Smith, my daddy, Manuel, ’n my two aunts, Eunice ’n Josephine, both younger than my daddy, (he wudn’t my daddy then, of course, him being only 12 years old at the time).
Now Grandpa had bought hisself a Nash automobile. Not that he much cared for, or for that matter, even believed in automobiles, having a strong preference for horses ’n mules but the times were changing ’n lots of people were talking about automobiles and they wuz  gettin’ to be pretty common ’n Manuel wuz already a pretty good driver ’n even had a driver’s license which he had filled out a form that he’d sent, along with a quarter, to Frankfort to get. Even though you didn’t really need a license to drive.
Anyhow, Manuel wuz splitting firewood in the barnyard. My grandma, Nora, was gathering eggs ’n the girls wuz somewhere up in the barn because Manuel could hear them giggling.
Manuel wuz the first to notice the yellow cloud of dust moving along Leatherwood ’n he knowed it had to be an automobile coming pretty fast to kick up that kind’a dust but he didn’t know it wuz Grandpa until the dust shifted direction ’n he saw the Nash headed for the creek ’n heard Grandpa yelling.
Now, my grandpa, John Sam Smith, was a quiet man. An almost silent man, he wuz a man who wudn’t prone to chewin’ his cud twice’t, so to say, ’n a lot of the time, if you wanted an opinion out of John Sam Smith, you had to pry it out of him ’n he wudn’t a man who pried easy.
 He was a pious man, a righteous man, who never raised his voice, seldom swore ’n wuz well thought of by ever’body that knew him.
But Manuel heard him now. When he told me this story,  he swore that he thought the whold world must’a heard him. Before he saw him, he heard him.
“DAMN YOU, WHOA.”
And out of a cloud of yellow dust, here come the Nash automobile, bouncing over the rutted lane, splashing through Leatherwood Creek, a red-faced John Sam clasping the steering wheel in a death grip…”Whoa, damn you. Whoa.” he shouted as he drove the Nash straight into the side of the barn.
Now, I don’t really have to tell you that he had ever’one’s attention. Manuel stood there, axe in hand, gaping. Nora was frozen ’n the girls were staring down from the hayloft as John Sam leapt from the driver’s seat with a tire iron gripped in his white-knuckled fist.
“By God!” he said, as he lunged to the front of the car, “I’ll learn you to whoa when I say whoa.” And he took an almighty whack at the radiator of that Nash automobile, busting it ’n cursing at the hot steam that come hissin’ out.
Now, my father was 90 years old the last time he told me this story ’n he still couldn’t tell it without laughing. He said it proved that even the most gentle soul had limits that you just shouldn’t go beyond.