Death of a Sergeant Part 8

There was a pickup truck parked in the yard, with a black man behind the wheel. The motor was running.

“This Mr. Taylor,” said Billy. “You go with him now, and do what he say. You gonna be in the Army now.”

Robert stared with uncomprehending eyes. Billy met his gaze. Reaching into his pocket, he took out three quarters.

“Boy,” he said, handing Robert the money, “I don’t know how much chance you got, but this is all there is. You hold on to that money and try to show some sense.”

* * * *

I remember Robert most of all from the first time I seen him, back in Germany, standing out in that cold, pouring rain, with that damn garrison cap half off his head and that overcoat just soaking wet. He was the sorriest soldier ever.

He would have stayed out there all day if Lonnie hadn’t seen him looking at us through the window. We brought him in and stripped him buck naked, right there in the mess hall. Then we wrapped him up in some blankets, set him down, and gave him some coffee.

Now, I thought I had seen country, but Robert beat them all. It took us a good two hours just to get him to tell us his name. And another two to get his story out of him. All he would say was that he had been up since four and that the man in the bus let him off at the corner and told him just walk straight until he came to the army place. Well, we figured it out that he walked close to ten miles through a cold rain, with no breakfast. He was a nigger, you see, and that’s the way the army did things in those days.

©Copyright 2009 Alan Vanneman

Continue reading Death of a Sergeant Part 8

Read Death of a Sergeant from the beginning

Sorry! Computer failure!

Double episode tomorrow! I promise!

MJQ—“Bag’s Groove”

A late gathering, and I’m not even sure if it’s Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums, but it certainly ought to be. Definitely John Lewis on piano and composer Milt Jackson on vibes. The MJQ could sound a little cutsy and contrived at times, but not here, not at all.

Pish-Posh at the Knish-Nosh, and Other New York Horrors

You know that little pond in Central Park next to the Alice in Wonderland statue, the pond that Big and Carrie fell into when Big tried to kiss Carrie and she didn’t want him to (because Amanda told her not to let him)? Well, it’s drained right now, which takes away a little from the charm, but, even so, if it’s a nice day, as it was last week, it’s a nice place to sit down and have a bite to eat, or so one might think. Unfortunately, the little carryout on the spot, the “Knish-Nosh,” is New York’s most ethnic and least charming eatery. The proprietor, a Gogolesque old Russian hag woman, is argumentative, grasping, and deceitful, while the customers, being New Yorkers, are almost as bad,* so we get dialogues like “What have you got? Is the chicken noodle soup good?” “Good? It’s wonderful. It’s homemade. It’s the best you can buy.” “Okay. I guess I’ll have that, except I don’t want any noodles—just chicken and chicken stock. Oh, and I guess some carrots.” “No noodles? It’s noodle soup. That’s what it is.” “Yeah, but I don’t want any, see? No noodles.”

If you go to the Knish-Nosh, skip the “world-famous chicken fingers,” which are awful, flabby and tough at the same time. In fact, avoid the food entirely, unless you’re willing to cough up four bucks for a mediocre hot dog, and just have a beer, not on the menu (because it’s illegal? dunno) but available.

Other things not to like about New York
Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a pain in the ass that knows no rest. In the past six months or so New York hotels have become environmentally friendly but hostile to humanity. The new heating/air-conditioning systems shut off whenever you leave the room, so that you always come “home” to a room that’s either too cold or too hot. You can finesse this, but you can’t finesse the new high-tech toilets, which save water by using a mighty blast of compressed air to blast the water and waste away, saving gallons at a time. At least, that’s the idea. The problem is, the first time you flush, it doesn’t work. The bowl seethes for several minutes, threatening first to overflow and then to explode, but ultimately nothing happens. When all the hissing stops, you flush it again and it actually works.

Over at the Met, the Vermeer exhibit, “Vermeer’s Masterpiece,” is both overcrowded and oversold. The focus is Vermeer’s “Milkmaid,” which is nice enough, but hardly strikes me as the best Vermeer I’ve ever seen. I strongly suspect that the Met has decided that this is Vermeer’s “masterpiece” because the subject is so humble—that would be entirely in line with the Met’s la-di-da faux populism—but I was too impatient to read all the subtext the Met provided. The Watteau exhibit is better, but still way too small.

What’s good about New York? Good beer and good sashimi on the Upper West Side, and great weather in Central Park. Yeah, the place is still worth a visit.

*Yeah, I am jaundiced, but I was there.

Anne Applebaum totally double-crosses me. Again!

This is getting ridiculous. I just finished nailing the last nail in Annie “Europe Sucks” Applebaum’s coffin, so I thought, when she uncorks a thoughtful, seriously pro-Europe review—a totally way pro-Europe review, actually—of Christopher Caldwell’s recent double-dome tome on Europe and the Muslim hordes, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

I haven’t actually read Mr. Caldwell’s book, so I’ll have to take Annie’s word for it that RREIIW is “blessedly objective,” and “written in good faith,” which in fact I seriously doubt. The seriously la-di-da title doesn’t help, but what really ticks me off about Chris is this quote, which I’ve read several times now, predicting that in the future the immigrant Muslim masses are going to stomp all the lazy, lotus-eating Euros into the ground: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

Obviously, that’s supposed to be profound, but instead it’s entire bullshit. What’s Mr. Caldwell’s sample size? Probably, one. And Europe isn’t all that “insecure or malleable”—they certainly don’t have much of a problem resisting our attempts to tell them what to do—and Islam is far from being “anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines.”

Islam is basically a chunk of the Middle Ages that has yet to thaw. Islam has no independent science, little art, little anything except endless theological disputes that will end, a century or two from now, the same way that Christian disputes over transubstantiation et al. ended, in exhaustion. The reactions of previous “anchored, confident” cultures to the Enlightenment West—Germany and Russia being the prime examples—is not exactly cheering, but in the end it was sloppy, lazy, hedonistic, materialistic, relativistic liberalism that won, not the fanatics.

Unlike Nazism or Communism, Islam will be around a long time—forever, in human terms. With a billion followers, and endless oil wealth going to fund fundamentalist clerics in love with the sound of their own vituperation, the prospects for an early end to the culture war is close to zero. But we in the West have all the high cards.

Neocons like Caldwell are desperate for a hot war because they don’t have high cards when it comes to domestic politics. They need an “unlimited” emergency, constant crisis, in order to suspend normal political discussion and demand unquestioning loyalty to the “Commander in Chief,” who is not our commander. Which is why they turn out crap like this book.

But don’t take my word for it. Read Anne, whom I seem to have forgotten about. She knows a lot about Europe, and she’s lived there for years, which I haven’t, and she’s also read Chris’s book, which I haven’t either.

Afterwords
Actually, Anne is far too polite to call Caldwell’s book crap. She simply refutes him on the facts. So get your attitude from me and your facts from Annie.

New at Bright Lights: Looking at Charlie

My review of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is now up at Bright Lights Film Journal here. Full issue, not entirely safe for work, here.* In an excellent piece, Karin Luisa Badt explains why Roman Polanski is a total shit here.

*I suppose the Updike triptych isn't entirely safe for work either. Sorry! At least there are no pictures.

Suitably Smoky—“Well, You Needn’t,” Parts IX and X

Featuring Hannibel Peterson on trumpet; Don Weller, tenor saxophone; Martin Blackwell, piano; Dave Green, bass; and Brian Spring, drums. Somewhere, and some time, in England.