As Uncle Hugh used to say, “If folks ever really knew what they were doing, Adam would have shot himself.”

And so we arrive upon a new year.

Which, as I have previously noted in this space, means precisely nothing, other than that we have passed an arbitrary denotation of time devised when Italians were ambitious.

Having since learned the error of their ways and rebuilt a city in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Proving that ambition, unlike Ferraris, dies hard.

Stubborn folly, however, will survive volcanic eruptions.

So we come to the real lesson of this date’s commemoration, i.e. Jan. 8, 1889.

The day Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine patent was issued.

Most people know the IBM mythology of Hollerith’s struggle to count the 1890 census, and how, using punch cards passing over electric terminals, completing a circuit anywhere there was a hole, and that Hollerith got the idea from the Jacquard loom.

Thereby saving society from a blind damnation unblessed by mathematical technology.

Jacquard looms (still available today, incidentally, in case you want to whip up any quick and easy textiles) use a stack of cards (of a little tougher construction than Hollerith’s) to set the warp and weave on a mechanical loom.

Only Herman Hollerith was an idiot.

He didn’t know c’mere from sic ‘em about anything but counting stuff, and, like most techies, he had no sense of history.

In brief, he was a Republican.

And he didn’t know Shinola about mechanical looms.

He’d only seen some of them work, and figured they were a good idea because they . . . well, worked.

Having failed to examine the contextual implications of the word “work.”

First, the Jacquard loom was not invented by a guy named Jacquard.

It was invented in 1801 by a guy named Charles. Joseph Marie Charles.

He was born in 1752 reared in Lyon, where there are apparently more people named Charles than there are smug winos, and, being French, the local populace is confused by any incidence of multiple things sharing the same name.

Since Joseph Marie’s family was from Lyon’s Couzon-au-Mont d’Or suburb near the Saône River, and his grandfather’s name was Barthélemy, that entire branch of the Charles family was nicknamed  “Jacquard.”

Makes perfect sense if you’re French or drink wine in quantity for about 10 centuries.

Second, Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard’s loom didn’t work all that well until he stole some ideas from Basile Bouchon , Jean Falcon  and Jacques de Vaucanson in a business arrangement similar to Bill Gates v. Steve Jobs.

Third, note the dates. What else was going on in the world while Charles Jacquard was fiddling with his loom?

A guy named Bonaparte thought Jacquard’s loom was just the thing to put the French textile industry on the map and the English textile industry in the toilet (remember, toilet paper, hadn’t been invented not even the stingy, scratchy single-sheet European kind. For that matter, neither had the mechanical toilet.) So he issued a patent, it perhaps never having occurred to him that the English have no respect for French patents, or French anything, for that matter, and were copying it once news of the Jacquard became known . . . because Bonaparte issued a patent for it.

Now, skip ahead a few years to the industrial revolution, when Jacquard looms were hooked up to a hyper-polluting power source sending thousands of weavers to the pauvre house. Whereupon they began tossing their wooden shoes, sabots, into their Jacquards, thereby adding the word “saboutage” to several languages.

Except that’s a lie.

See how gullible you are if, like Herman Hollerith, you spend all your time thinking about machinery.

There is no historical record anywhere of any French weaver throwing his shoes at a loom.

Probably the word comes from the simple fact that French weavers wore wooden shoes because they were cheap and looked so rustically cool in Impressionist paintings.

Actually, the English word “Luddite” does come from loom smashing.

A retarded man named Ned Lud, or Ludd, or Ludlam, or possibly Smith or Smedly-Symington, as far as that goes, since there’s no record of his even having existed at all, smashed a knitting square with a hammer, or his fist because he was beaten for idleness, or for licentiousness, or because he was taunted by some street urchins, or because he misunderstood an order from his father.

At any rate, during the aforementioned Industrial Revolution, when English weavers smashed machinery in  protest, they protested that “Ned Lud did it.”

Now, skip ahead another century or so and you find an economy grievously ravaged by the further wonders of the Jacuquad loom when you have five billion Chinese sitting around with nothing to do but put the U.S. textile industry out of business for pennies a day.

Grievous unless you’re Walmart, which is really good at ravaging.

All of which gets us back to Hollerith’s folly.

Fascinated by all those beautifully voluminous numbers his new machine was turning out, it never occurred to him what a census is; more important, what it does.

A census, like any statistical study, is merely an object of interpretation.

Further, the accuracy of any complex mechanical mathematical calculation depends entirely on where you set the decimal, or where you “round off” figures.

Add an additional number to the numbers after the decimal, and you can, in large calculations, arrive at a different solution by several whole numbers.

So while Hollerith was certainly aware that adding numbers before the decimal, he never considered that adding number after it would have the same effect.

He was not concerned with the effect; merely the mechanics.

For example, the quicker, sexier census of 1890 led Frederic Jackson Turner to the conclusion that there were no more appreciable amounts of free land available in the United States, and we would no longer have any place for the dregs of society to flee, seeking new opportunities to become prosperous and happy citizens.

The effects of this kind of thinking, popularized and politicized as it has been, exhibits the foolishness of basing thinking on mathematical calculations.

That assumes that society actually has dregs.

You can see them right there, numbers of people who make small numbers of money, commit large numbers of crimes, live in specific numerically classifications of neighborhoods, have low numbers of years of formal education, and numerically think and act according to calculated patterns of behavior.

It could never be that some people are perfectly happy with a bib apron, a paper hat and a week’s worth of pot.

Or that armed robbery doesn’t have so much to do with education levels other than people making the same kind of decisions about both.

Or maybe there are no drugs; maybe that for those who base our decisions in terms of statistical analysis,  the land of opportunity just doesn’t offer all that many opportunities to anybody but those who are willing to sell souls or settle for less.

This column began about three decades ago. I began working on it in 1985. I’m still not sure I’ve got it right, but it is my Christmas present to you, as it once was to me.

Christmas never meant that much to me.

Well, not after I quit sticking my feet under mama’s table, anyway.

Most of my Christmases were spent in some bar or greasy spoon poring over a still-damp early edition with my byline and somebody else’s bloody mistake all over it.

I had about as much goodwill in my soul as a multiple-car pileup or a family reunion shooting.

But that was before I had supper with Santa Claus.

It was called Pete’s, or maybe Joe’s, or the Deluxe Diner; someplace with enough chrome out front to grille a Cadillac and enough grease out back to lube one. About the only thing to recommend it was that it hadn’t the decency to close on Christmas Eve.

He was sitting there in a dirty red suit that looked like it came from the north pole, alright, by way of the seedier parts of New Jersey. His hat and mittens lay in a crumpled heap on the only other occupied seat in the joint.

He was nursing a cup of bad coffee and line of worse jokes. The cook ignored him so he tried a few on the waitress. She wasn’t buying, either. Humor doesn’t sit well on hot griddles and flat feet.

More out of curiosity than compassion, boredom than benevolence, I sat down and soaked up a couple of his jokes.

His name was Meyer.

He lived alone.

He sensed he had an ear beside him primed for more than corny puns, so he filled it with his life’s story.

His wife died. Car wreck. They said the guy was drunk. Who knows? To this day, he said, he still slept on the one side of the bed.

They had a son, born just in time for Khe San.

Bitter? Nah! He was an immigrant. Maybe if he hadn’t come here, his son would never have been born at all.

But he missed kids, So every year he put on the suit and went down to juvenile hall to play Santa…

Juvenile Hall?

Jeez, Meyer, juvy hall? An orphan’s home or the children’s hospital maybe. But juvy hall? That’s like delivering kittens to a hyena den! The kids they lock up out there have broken glass for souls!

Yeah. This year a kid they had in isolation (That’s the child psychology euphemism for solitary.) spit on him. Youngster about 15. You probably remember reading about him.

No. I wrote about him.

I remembered all right.

I remembered a pool of congealed blood next to a busted open candy machine.

I remembered a young woman with a couple of babies who would have to make do with a smiling cop’s fading, black-draped picture instead of a father. She had that kind of stunned agony on her face people get when they’ve been told their life is over, but they’ve got to go on living anyway.

I remembered the obituary of a naive kid just out of the academy who once told his partner he didn’t like wearing a gun, but if he did, maybe everybody else wouldn’t have to.

I remembered a rap sheet on a youngster about 15 that took up three pages.

He was a punk.

Now he was a killer.

“Lord, Meyer, what kind of kid spits on Santa Claus?”

“Exactly the kind of kid who needs to know there is a Santa Claus.

“Come on, Meyer, I been to more than three county fairs and a taffy pull. I don’t want to hear that sheep dip about how there ain’t no bad kids… “

“Oh no, there’s bad kids. Lot’s of ‘em. And bad places where they come from and most of them never get out of. Sure there’s bad kids. Why do you think I go down to juvy hall every year in this lousy suit and pretend not to die inside when I remember putting together an electric train for my little boy and talking to my Sarah about really important things like getting a new couch, or where we would send him to college or whether we should try to get a new car next year or the year after? I don’t let all that kill my soul because there’s bad kids. And because there’s not much you or me or anybody can do about it except whatever we can.”

“C’mon, Meyer, you’re not even a Christian…”

“So maybe a guy from Nazareth wasn’t a Jew? Lemme tell you something. When my boy died, they took a long time getting the body home. So long I got mad about it. It seems sort of foolish now, but at the time it was important to me. So they finally told me why.

“See, he wounded. And this corpsman, this other kid named Reilly was carrying him. And when they got hit by this mortar shell, they got all mixed up together, and they took some time straightening things out. How many Jews you know named Reilly? Tell me how a Lace Curtain Mick from New Rochelle gets mixed up in the same plastic sack with a Jew from Dallas. Maybe then we can talk more about Christians and Jews.”

We talked some more. I don’t remember about what. Christmas mostly.

I didn’t notice until he said his good-byes and reached to pay for his coffee. As his hand extended across the counter, the frayed red sleeve hiked up about halfway to reveal a tattoo on the underside of his forearm; a series of dark blue numbers.

I sat for a long time after he left, staring at my own reflection against the moonless city night, thinking. Thinking about history; humankind, whatever that is. Thoughts. Deeds. Words.

Mostly some words I hadn’t thought of in a long time, but have thought of quite a lot since:

“Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, for unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior…”

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “The only thing stupider than a chicken is two chickens. So if smarts mean survival, how come we still have enough chicken to feed all the preachers in Texas every Sunday?”

Haven’t been here for a while, so it’s been way too long since an episode of TOO STUPID TO LIVE!!!

And our first contestants are: The Threaders of Texas and their customers.

Or, people who pay other people to pull their hair out.

No, not a new trend in S&MB&D; although probably on the way to an adult bookstore near your church even as we speak, but an ancient technique for hair removal.

Understand that at my age, removing hair is really sort of a sore subject.

No pun intended.

OK, I lied. Completely intentional.

I remove enough hair just taking a shower to reprise a Broadway show.

But people are picky.

They dread losing hair in the right places while expending time and money to get ride of it in places TeeVee deems unsightly.

But vanity and evolution collide, and humans seem to consider earthworms and mole rats more attractive than chimpanzees or sasquatch, and a whole new lawsuit was born.

The ancient Oriental art of threading involves running over one’s body a twisted cotton string held between the practitioner’s teeth and fingers, entangling the unwanted hair and twisting it out by the roots.

Oriental art according to Sun Tzu.

It is supposedly less painful than waxing.

While deprived of any personal experience here, I suspect that a 150-grit random orbital sander is less painful than waxing.

But then Porter-Cable isn’t suing the state of Texas.

Which is what threaders are doing.

Texas requires a license to pull hair — at least to charge people to pull hair.

And said license requires about 750 hours of training, apparently none of which instructs one in how to tangle hair and twine.

The State of Texas is accused of meddling in the free pursuit of lassoing hair while flossing.

Threaders consider the license unfair, expensive, and irrelevant.

Sort of like pulling your hair in order to attract someone of the opposite sex, as though one would want to attract someone so shallow that he or she considers a hair out of place to be decisive in a relationship.

I refuse to make any litigation jokes about splitting hairs.

Do they ring doorbells in WHAT?

In a Williamson County suburb of Austin, D.C., a 40-year-old man is accused of threatening three boys with an AR-15, the civilian version of our continued commitment in Afghanistan, for ringing his doorbell and running away.

No poo, no burning paper sack, no Prince Albert in the can.

Ring the doorbell and run away.

Hysterical to anyone under 12.

Hysterically involving use deadly force if you’re 40.

So, let’s all go downtown and sort this out, Rambo.

Burglary 101

Lesson 1: Do not attempt to burgle a residence when the occupant is at home. They tend to call the cops, then pursue you, as did the resident of an East Sixth street apartment in Austin (Where else?) last week.

Lesson 2: Do not wear a bright red flannel coat and a ski hat. Clothing suitable for burglary should be difficult to describe. Not “Santa Claus with a head like a chicken…”

Lesson 3: City buses make poor getaway vehicles. Particularly when you board carrying a 12-guage double-barrel shotgun and a pillow case full of household items.

Lesson 3: Wait until dark.

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Civilized people stay out of all the best places.”

As King Cotton greedily devoured the blackland prairie of East Texas, there remained, as there have been in most parts of America, some places that defied taming.

Like the breaks of the Panhandle, the Bottoms of East Texas remained wild and, for the careless or uninitiated, dangerous places.

The Texas lands first settled by the Hulens and Overtons were like an island of prairie rising out of two vast swamplands, or river bottoms.

To the north, Red River Bottoms geographically split Texas from “Indian Territory.”

Until I was “a good-sized kid,” as our elders would say, I knew Oklahoma by that common and original title.

Barely twenty miles distant as the crow flies, it was a world away: a world of snakes, man-sized catfish and gar, quicksand, and outlaws.

To the south, Cuthand Creek slashed across the miles of cotton rows as it gouged its way wider and wider until it was swallowed by the vast and legendary Sulphur Bottom, more than a hundred miles of seeping flow, clogged by debris “rafts,” miles-long log jams packed so tight by the seasonal flooding that the dense forests simply grew over them. It was a pick-up sticks of leg-breaking, rotting ground with decay that nourished an astonishing variety of wild and intriguingly dangerous things from blood thirsty insects to sleek and soulless felines. The open sloughs and channels were a muddy soup of alligators, cottonmouths and prehistoric survivors like the gaspergou and jackfish.

The Red was haunted by timber rattlers and even coral snakes. It had more than its share of ‘gators and other big predators, but the river had been a highway since Captain Shreve blew up the raft below Shreveport long before the War Between the States, opening the river to navigation.

Red River was wild, but friendly.

Sort of like our Uncle Hugh.

Maybe there was a bad side, but it was an easy side to live with once you learned to stay off of it.

But nothing good came out of Sulphur Bottom, so the Sunday School teachers would say.

No one traversed the Sulphur, or wanted to.

The Red could serve up goods for a dozen Texas and Oklahoma settlements.

The Sulphur went nowhere. It just seeped out of countless seasonally dry Northeast Texas creeks, then oozed into the Red just across the Louisiana line.

We never heard of Bigfoot, the current talk of the Bottoms since “The Legend of Boggy Creek” hit the B-house movie screens. The real Fouk Monster was dreamed up by a group of Arkansas-Louisiana Bottom dwellers who hoped it would frighten away a group of black families who moved into the area.

Not all monsters live in the Bottoms.

Some haunt the heart of hate.

Our monsters were real: panthers we heard scream in the still night distance, bears that would rob a litter from the hog pens of families struggling in the thin soil too close to the Bottoms.

But even more frightening was the unknown.

A mud-caked horse or mule would wander back home after its rider was days overdue. The trail would simply lead into the Bottom and die there.

Quicksand and gator holes could swallow up horse and rider. Wild hogs the size of ponies foraged omnivorously. Red wolves and coyotes prowled the trail of misfortune, leaving barely enough to keep a buzzard alive.

Cattle, horses, dogs and men would somehow disappear into the Bottoms.

It was good for two things: squirrel hunting and whiskey.

At its widest part, the Sulphur runs parallel to Cuthand and White Oak Bottoms. Rather than the four or five-mile traverse, the Bottoms spread out more than twenty miles across. Only two paved highways cross it even now, and compared to the early part of the last century, the bottoms are tame as a city park.

It was an ideal place to cook whiskey.

There is still a community on the White Oak known as Sugar Hill, named after the wagon load of sugar and yeast once delivered weekly to the little grocery store there.

Several times our Cuthand squirrel hunts would be cut short when my dad or granddad would catch the scent of woodsmoke and boiling mash on the heavy fall air.

The Bottoms were no place to come across a still.

These were enterprises of men unafraid of all the teeth and toxins with which nature chose to arm herself. They did business surrounded by places most people dread.

And they were the most dangerous creatures in the Bottoms.

Them old boys fought wars in those Bottoms, killed over territories, customers, deals.

Somehow I never blamed them.

There was a well-known family named Belcher, well-known among the thirsty, that is, living in Cuthand Bottom.

They were honest in their dealings and quick in their judgment. They did not suffer fools lightly.

One of the Belchers was killed by a bootlegger (A bootlegger sells whiskey; a whiskey cook is an artist. The Belchers were artists with an easily offended aesthetic sense.) The killer propped the body against an oak tree and cut off one ear “so I’d know him in hell.”

The bootlegger was sent to prison to be paroled after a few years.

Shortly thereafter they found him in the middle of the road gut shot with a 12-gauge load of tacks.

The sheriff was just beginning his investigation when the wizened old justice of the peace showed up and declared the death a suicide.

Suicide? His middle opened up like a drugstore on Sunday?

“He killed a Belcher and come back to Cuthand Bottom,” the old man said. “That was suicide.”

To a certain way of thinking, it was merely justice delayed.

That body could have been dragged a couple of hundred yards and no one would have known about it but the hogs and the buzzards. Instead, he was laid out for all to see.

And know.

Now, justice was served.

Such is the product of prohibition.

The only difference between the Daniels of Tennessee and the Belchers of Cuthand Bottom is that Lynchburg possesses a more enlightened electorate.

The “dry county” has killed more people than smallpox.

Make chewing gum illegal and there’ll be a dozen Chiclet-related killings the first week.

We seem never to learn that there are places on this earth where humankind is not welcome. We can either leave those places to God’s palate or destroy them in our own image.

Texas plans to build a series of lakes along Sulphur Bottom, flooding the last few miles of unconquered freedom to water lawns in Dallas and run Ski-doos around in circles over the graves of wild things that will never again scream in the night and disturb our dreamless sleep.

And all we need be afraid of is ourselves.

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Whoever said, ‘There’s no fool like an old fool!’ never had children.”

So, the Students for a Democratic Society is back and battling high tuition.

If we ever left.

Let me save you guys some grief.

Don’t expect to outlast the war.

Most of your comrades are just here for the dope and the girls.

Uh, make that women.

Unless you are a woman.

And if you are a woman, what’s your sign?

Another sizeable percentage of your ranks just don’t want to get drafted.

In the long term, most will end up as Republicans.

And the rest will end up like me.

Not much of a future, hunh?

So, consider the alternatives and just go jump off the university tower.

If you have a tower.

We didn’t have one at Austin College.

Well, there was a chapel steeple, but that would have been a bit melodramatic for a Presbyterian.

Even if it was predestined.

So I transferred to East Texas State, where the only tall building on campus was the preppy dorm.

Not the crowd for a James Dean road trip.

You could drown yourself in the campus lake, if you didn’t know how many people had barfed in it or . . . well, let’s just say there are some things worse than death.

I suppose now you could make some kind of solidarity statement with your fellow Middle Eastern student brothers and become a suicide bomber.

But considering that in the traditional SDS lexicon, a bomber was a marijuana cigarette the size of your thumb, it wouldn’t be much of a statement.

Not a very coherent one, anyway.

Now you are a bullhorn crying in the wilderness.

With too many syllables.

We had it simple: Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Make love, not war! U.S. out now! Hey, man, spare change?

Now sloganeering is tough: One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ deficit! Outsourcing is not healthy for children and other living things! Hell no, we won’t join the National Guard!

The short answer is, there is no short answer.

You can’t oppose globalization without appearing racist.

At least you can’t without a five-page policy analysis.

Immigration is simply a nightmare, because the issue isn’t immigration.

It’s a decent life for working people.

And let’s face it, most people who are part of SDS, then and now, aren’t exactly Joe Hill.

More like Westlake Hills.

But then that’s where most revolutionaries come from, isn’t it?

Thomas Paine, Lenin, Chè Guevarra.

Pretty yuppie bunch.

I could emphasize that this radical point of view is brought to you by the first generation middle class son of a couple of public school administrators from Detroit, Texas.

So, hello, young radicals where ever you are, I’ve had a cause of my own.

And have some free advice, which is probably worth exactly what you paid for it.

First, accept that there’s practically no chance that you’ll win.

Certainly we, your predecessors, haven’t dealt you a lot of high cards.

I’m sorry, but we used up all the fun in the 60s.

No more sex, drugs, and rock’n roll.

All we left for you is STDs, Just Say No, and Dave Matthews.

You may not even make a difference.

And the matters you do change will eventually be hyped to sell boxed set CD collections commercially interrupting old movies in the early morning hours.

Second, who cares?

You aren’t in this for yourself, and if you give a damn what anybody else thinks about you one way or another, you’re in the wrong business.

Try insurance.

But if you want to shave or make up a face each morning that you can look back at with no guilt or regrets, then pick up your sign, go to your meetings, and do battle with the Prince of Darkness on Meet the Press.

Maybe you can fix some of the things we failed to make right.

And even if you can’t, when that first shovel-full of dirt lands on the lid of your casket, you will know that, even if you didn’t make too much of a difference, they damn sure knew you were here.

Even if they hate you for it.

And by the way, yes, it was worth it.

Hell, it was a gas!

I’m even sorry I’m not young enough to go with you and do it all again.

Being hated by all the right people ain’t half bad.

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “More folks know the town drunk than the mayor.”

This Week on

“Meet the Palins:”

Mom writes a “book;” even though she’s really never read one. Meanwhile, Todd starts drinking again, and hilarity ensues. Levi bare-ly appears in a girlie magazine, and Mom throws the “book” at him, then befriends a strange black woman. Todd starts drinking again, and hilarity ensues. Trig asks for an adoption for Christmas, but Mom gets him a talk-show guest spot instead. Todd starts drinking again, and hilarity ensues. Bristol starts dating again, and hilarity ensues.

Run, Sarah, run.

Ple-e-e-ease!

Truco Ricardo Perro

And then there was the one about the Mexican invasion of Presidio.

Lying Tricky Ricky Perry, the governor Texas didn’t want, accused the federal immigration service of importing thousands . . . or was it billions? . . . of illegal aliens to poor, defenseless little Presidio, a Big Bend town of 28,000.

It seems U.S. Customs and Border Protection (Did they think somebody was going to steal the border?) takes single Mexican men, 20-60, whom they catch in Arizona, down to Presidio and gives them some food and water, then sends them across the bridge, where Mexican cops load them on a bus and take them further south.

The idea was that if they paid some guy in Arizona to get them into the U.S., and they get caught and returned across the Arizona border, they might look at that same guy and point out that getting caught wasn’t part of the deal, and he might smuggle them back across in preference to getting a drywall hock up ‘side of his head.

If they get taken to Presidio, they can’t find that guy, and they just take the government bus back home.

Maybe try again later, maybe not.

Tricky neglected to mention that part about the government bus.

Instead, he said, folks in Presidio are gonna be stacking illegal Mexicans up like cordwood by sundown.

Oh, and he also neglected to mention that the Border Protectors have been doing this same thing in Eagle Pass for years.

Now, show me a stack of Mexicans in Eagle Pass.

Well, actually, Tricky Ricky may not have noticed that most of the inhabitants of Presidio and Eagle Pass are not Irish.

He also failed to notice, as most of the government has, that people in both places are perfectly capable of solving their own problems, if anyone cared to listen to them and give them a hand.

At least a hand that doesn’t have a green uniform or a politician attached.

Let’s face it. In a town of 28,000 people, most folks know who belongs there and who doesn’t.

Boom box defense

Mercenaries warded off a pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama this week by firing guns and playing high decibel noise.

The same guys will be cruising by your house in a low-rider Dodge tomorrow at 3 a.m.

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “I don’t know whether death and taxes are both certain. I ain’t died yet.”

Any sensible human being knows that the Tea Party Partisans are slack-jawed morons.

And that Lying Texas Governor Tricky Ricky Perry, the governor Texas didn’t want, would coon-hunt with a shih-tzu if he thought his hair would get on TeeVee for even a second.

But I suspect most of that knowledge is mere supposition.

Like, how much sense could these guys have, since they obviously still use Wildroot Cream-Oil?

But apart from the obvious — like protesting high taxes while standing on an $11 million government seawall to throw fake tea into a bay dredged at a cost of $20 million per annum that provides them with government jobs — there are sound historical reasons why the Tea Heads just ain’t right.

Especially in Texas.

Ballot Realities

Reason one: Let’s talk about the Yankee government briefly. What do we spend most of our money for? Well, more than half, about 54 percent, goes to guns, bullets, soldiers, and interest. Star Wars to Walter Reed. And the banks and insurance companies who lent us the money to make Iraq the garden spot it is today.

And just how many Tea Baggers oppose the wars in the Middle East?

Another 30 percent goes for everything from Social Security to education to Medicare. Let’s see the hands of all those who want to cut any of that stuff? Now, let’s see how many elected officials plan to make cutting any of that stuff part of their next campaigns.

Feel free to hack away at that other 16 percent, like the $20 billion in highways, a billion for GPS and HBO satellites, $2.4 billion for national parks and a couple of bills more for maybe the FBI, CIA, Border patrol, whatever.

Not that there isn’t waste; it’s just that where there’s a dollar, there’s an argument for why somebody needs it.

Texas Our Taxes

Reason two: Absent the federal government, learn some Spanish.

We can’t even stop unarmed civilians sneaking across the border to hang drywall.

How will we make out without the Yankee army against heavily armed, coked-up cartel gorillas?

Not to mention the guerillas.

Currently we spend just 6.2 percent of our $167 billion, or around $10.3 billion on state security, That’s cops and judges.

Want an army? Fort Hood maintenance and improvements alone this year were $13 billion.

But let’s pretend that no one would want to invade Texas.

We spend 44 percent of the state budget on education. That’s $73 billion or so. Add $10 billion that we would no longer get from the feds.

Health and human services makes up 31.6 percent of the budget, or $52.8 billion. Now add to that the loss of Social Security for everybody, young and old, in the state. Then add in Medicare, which most people do NOT want to do without, and the FDA, CDC and all the rest of the alphabet that keeps drug companies from poisoning us all and staves off a cholera comeback.

History Of Broke

For those of us who might have wondered why Texas would have ever joined the union in the first place, the answer is simple.

We were broke.

We owed about $10 million when the average family income was less than $600 per year. We had a population of around 200,000, almost all small farmers, who were using only about 6.8 percent of the land. We were engaged in a war with the Comanche that we had been losing since 1839. Plus, dispossessing Tejanos was expensive, since they tended to take it hard when the government steals from them. No imminent domain protests back then.

We had, even then, our share of something-for-nothing Tea Types.

Taxation was a complex compilation of exemptions and self-valuation that resulted in few taxes paid. Sheriffs, for example, collected the taxes, but only occasionally turned them it. To protest a tax rate, all one had to do was find two local people to say it was too high. Horses and poll tax were exempt for Indian fighters. And who wasn’t an Indian fighter? Horses kept for riding were taxed at $10 per year, but if the animal was ever used with a carriage, it was only a buck a head. Mules and draft animals were 25 cents per year, with an exemption of four head. Slaves were taxed up to $4 per year, but could be taxed at an ad valorem rate of one-fifth of one percent per hundred dollars of valuation. Tariffs were levied on all foreign goods, but only if they were delivered through the port of Galveston. Smuggling up and down the coast was rife, and so was born Corpus Christi.

Ever wonder what happened to that big chunk of New Mexico stretching all the way to Idaho that appeared on those old Texas maps?

Texas got on the flag and out of debt; the United States got the West.

Trade Up

Back at the turn of the last century, my grandfather’s taxes were levied at three days working on the county road crew. One if you brought a team of mules.

When it rained, he went to town horseback instead of in a wagon. He had a third grade education, a coal oil lamp and an outhouse.

It was a workable system.

Even people who had no money contributed to the general welfare.

Folks knew if you didn’t pay your fair share.

Then he got a car, my mother went to college, he had electric lights and running water.

He got a tax statement higher than a two week’s pay.

And he thought it was one helluva deal.

(Editor’s note: This column was written almost 30 years ago as a Veterans Day remembrance of a man who had been a soldier. The story is true, as nearly as my imperfect memory can regenerate it. I have tried to recall this tale again in an effort to remember the spirit of a man who fervently believed that we have forgotten too much.)

I don’t think it was November.

It was early fall, a little cooler than usual as the arctic edged south a bit, its first hint of seasonal death hanging in the air like the omnipresent drizzle stripping the hardwoods of their first brown leafy sacrifices to the approaching god of winter.

We sat bored, our mood damp as the wool and the weather, watching our Boy Scout camping trip soak unceasingly into the soggy, slick Oklahoma hills.

While I certainly think of it now, back then no one questioned how Mr. Norwood was able to keep a fire going under the tent fly with no dry wood and no scorched canvas. It was just one of those things you took for granted, like the extra  clean socks, underwear and jeans in your pack. You would have known your mother put them there if you’d thought about it, but you didn’t. Certainly you didn’t talk about it.

Sort of like Mr. Norwood.

He was just the old man who drove the bus for the Boy Scouts, kind of a sour old guy. Never said too much except to yell at us through the rearview mirror to settle down, sit down and quit all that hollerin’. We just figured he went with the bus, part of the loan to the Scouts like the school gave us the bus and the National Guard let us have the tents and the church let us have the groceries.

Except for the Hershey bars and cupcakes and ginger ale and stuff.

Nobody let us have that but us.

We never figured why old Mr. Norwood gave up his time and his summers to ferry a bunch of howling yard apes to camp. Like all a school bus driver has to do with his summers is haul more kids around.

We never wondered why old Mr. Norwood always slept in the bus instead of in the tents with us.

Until that night.

I guess he figured we were pretty much a mess, all of us running around in the rain, pitching mudball fights and water wars all day, and he took pity on us, starting a fire in one of the few tents still standing despite the weather-bound pranks.

Whoever said it regretted it.

But it didn’t matter. We all joined in it.

We’d  heard that Mr. Norwood was in the war, so we chorused, and repeated the refrain, “Tell us some war stories.”

First he ignored us.

But we would not be ignored.

Like I said, we had a lot of war surplus equipment given to us.

He reached down and picked up an entrenching tool.

It was the first time I’d seen that look. I’ve seen it since, though I’m not sure I can describe it. It’s a hard, brittle look, like glass in a fire; a piercing stare halfway between tears and rage; a maddened searching, demanding look from someplace hidden within the soul, someplace raw, scarred and bloody.

It is the look of a man who sleeps little and dreams much.

“I onct beat a man to death with one of these. He was a mail carrier. Had a picture of his wife and little boys in his boot. I beat him ‘til we was both bloody and he just sat right down there in the trench and scratched his moustache with one finger ‘til he died.”

He fixed us all with that stare, and holding the entrenching tool toward us like a bitter accusation, went on; only now we weren’t sure we wanted him to.

“You want to hear a war story? All right, you little snots. Here’s a war story.

“They come in about three hours before daylight. Barrages. Tons of it. Hear? Hell, you couldn’t even think. Suck th’ air right out of you. Couldn’t draw a breath. Boys down the line from you just got blowed up. One secont they was there and then they wasn’t. Sometimes you’d git buried. Shells and bombs would just cover you plumb up with dirt. Two, three foot deep. You’d lie there and pray for it to stop, and when it did, you’d pray some more that it was just a letup. ‘Cause when it quit, that meant they was comin’.

“You’d get up and knock the mud out of the action best you could and lock out the box, git you a handful of rounds and start killin’ single-shot at five, six hundred yards. They kept comin’, us killin’ ’em the whole time. When they hit our wire, you unlocked the box and used them last five rounds fast as you could. Then it got down to whatever was handy.

“They jist kept on ‘til there wasn’t no more of ‘em to keep on. I seen ‘em come over them trenches with arms, heads blowed off, jist run over th’ top and fall down dead. Shovels was the best. We’d sit around and whet ‘em like a knife. Some boys used a pick axe, butcher knife or jist a good stout stick of stovewood. Bayonets wasn’t much good when a bunch of ‘em got in on you like that.

“Sometimes one of us would jist go crazy. Turn to water when they come over the top. Best thing when that happent was just to grab him quick as you could and shove him down in the trench and stand on him. Hope if it ever happent to you — and it happent to everbidy sometime — somebody’d do th’ same for you ‘cause if they ever seen you wallerin’ around like that, cryin’, screamin’, they’d stick you f’r sure. Like they couldn’t stand it. Skeert it would happen to them, I figgered, like it was catchin’.

“Then all of a sudden there just wouldn’ be nobidy there. Nobidy left to kill. Then you’d git your rifle, or somebody’s, and git ready. Whistles would blow most times and we’d go right back at ‘em. They’d commence to shellin’ us again when we hit no man’s land.

“It was like a warshed out cotton patch out there. But it was better for them barrages than in the trenches. They didn’t always git your range. ‘Course when they used gas it was worse. It run downhill. If you jumped in a shell hole, it was full of gas. If you didn’t you got shot or blowed up. Sometimes wind would come up and it blowed back on ‘em. We run up on their trenches an’ they was jist full of dead men, gassed.”

He stretched out a partially clenched, somehow imperfect but not scarred or misshapen hand, over the fire. It quivvered slightly, uncontrolled, suspended in the smoky dampness. Then he pronounced like some undeniable horror:

“Gas.”

He went on through the night to the soft stacatto on the canvas. He took us from the troopships to death’s quagmire, barely trained boys denied knowledge that could have saved them on the theory that, had they known what they faced, they might have deserted. Some units were not even taught how to clean their rifles on that same theory, reasoning that  after the first action, only half would need to know how.

How little the theorists knew who they were.

Together we crawled back through the dark terrors of no man’s land after some aborted raid or ill-conceived assault. We learned the feel of fire in in our chests, Satan’s faith in a mustard seed. We heard a comrade’s cough that became constant by nightfall, fatal by morning. We thought how one should word a letter that a son died of a cold in a distant place where colds kill. We ate horses and rats and Christmas candy that tasted of cordite. Our teeth fell out. Our toes rotted. We shot, stabbed, strangled and were done the same. We learned it all.

Except why.

It was a long night.

But we had our war story.

None of us went back to our tents that night. We slept where we sat, huddled close in a crowded tent, often awakening to one another’s fretful stirrings, and each time, there, tending the fire, a man made old by time and events, sat at the edge of the night holding an entrenching tool like a crucifix.

At 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of each year, there is a special memorial that I have always recalled, a special tribute I always pay.

Norwood, Owenby

Sergeant

American Expeditionary Force.

Who once killed a postman with a shovel, and made sure a troop of would-be warriors never forgot it.

It’s Halloween again, and having borrowed my headline from Kipling, I shall now borrow this column from myself. I wrote it a dozen years ago, and it seems to have lost none of its popularity. One can hardly lose what he does not possess.

Most people like ghost stories.

The lover’s lane killer with the hook, the headless corpse, the disappearing midnight hitchhiker all are timeless tales that have chilled bedtimes since bedtimes began.

Why?

It’s fun to be scared.

Well, it’s fun to be scared when being scared is all in fun.

There are no intriguing yarns about things truly scary: poverty, oppression, loneliness, madness.

No, real ghost stories are about things surreal, things that, in the cold, clear light of day we know can never be.

Such fanciful fears excite us, stimulate our imaginations, make us appreciate that we are alive and, regardless of our goose bumps, well and safe.

But some ghosts are real; though not in the way we imagine.

I know.

I once did battle with just such a ghost.

When I was a first grader in Avery, Texas, my parents moved into an old house near the tracks.

It had once been a grand Victorian, but had fallen into disrepair over the years and divided into apartments.

My parents, my brother, older by three years, and I lived in one and a pleasant, elderly couple named Marsh lived in the other.

Across the rear of the house we shared a large screened-in porch.

Before public water service became available in East Texas, most folks depended on cisterns, large, brick-encased holes in the ground that captured and stored roof runoff for household use.

Even though Avery had long since installed a city water system, many homes still had a cistern.

Our cistern was located in the middle of the back porch.

After school one day, my older, smarter brother, Fred, and I learned some eerie facts about the house in which we lived.

“It’s haunted,” pronounced my friend and classmate, Guy Lemmond.

“The feller that lived there taken a butcher knife to his wife and kids. After he cut ‘em up and throwed ‘em in the cistern, he tied the wringer off’n that big warshin’ machine on the back porch ‘round his neck and drowned hisself down there, too. Ever since then, his ghost climbs up out of that cistern an’ roams the house with a bloody butcher knife lookin’ for his wife and kids.”

“How come he roams the house lookin’ if he threw ‘em in the cistern? Why don’t he look for ‘em down there?” I asked. “That don’t make no sense.”

“How do I know? I ain’t no ghost. ‘Sides, ghosts don’t have to make sense. They’re dead.”

“That ain’t true,” scoffed Fred.

“Is too!” Guy whined.

“Ain’t neither. You don’t know nothin’. You’re just a little kid.”

“Oh, it’s true, all right. ‘Least the part about him jumpin’ in the cistern,” added Paul Wayne Meggason.

He was older than any of us.

“I seen th’ sheriff an’ th’ farmen when they come to drag him out with ropes and big ol’ hooks.”

Neither Fred nor I said much more about it, but I knew that the tale was much on my brother’s mind.

Certainly it was much on mine.

That night at supper, we asked the ultimate authority in all such matters, our father.

“Yes,” he said, adopting a grave, school principal’s expression.

“A man named Farley did live here before us. Poor man went nuts.”

“And did he kill his wife an’ kids and cut ‘em up an’ throw ‘em in th’ cistern?” I asked, already dreading his answer.

“I heard that, but I’m not sure it’s true. I also heard that he just attacked his wife; that she ran out of the house and escaped with only a badly cut arm.”

“And is his ghost….”

“This is not fit conversation for the supper table,” pronounced my mother.

While my father was the ultimate authority, my mother was the ultimate authoritarian. The subject was closed.

We wondered about the dreaded Farley ghost for some time after that, but it effected us little until basketball season.

Both our parents coached; my father, the boys’ team and my mother, the girls. Each Tuesday and Friday night they were away from home until quite late.

Fred and I were left on our own with a cold supper and strict orders to be in bed by nine. It was only on nights that our parents were away that the ghost of Farley began to move about.

Ghosts are clever like that.

They never appear around those who can dispel their mythology.

After we were in bed, the noises began.

First we would hear a seemingly harmless drip from the dank cistern.

Or perhaps it would disguise itself as a sound like the scurry of a cat or some other innocent night-prowling animal.

But we knew better.

We knew it was the Farley ghost beginning his ghastly ascent, gory knife clinched in his rotting yellow teeth, searching for innocent children as his next victims.

“Did you hear that?” I would ask from beneath the covers.

“No!” would answer my brother, a little too loudly.

“Yes, you did!”

“It wasn’t nothin’! Go to sleep. Ooo! There it is again.”

“He’s comin’ up! I know it!”

“One of us has to go and throw somethin’ down there an’ knock him back down ‘fore he gits out.”

Fred always had a plan. Rarely did it involve him.

“O.K. You go.”

“No! You!”

“No, I’m too skeered.”

“Well, if you don’t go, he might git us and he might not. But if you don’t go, I’m gonna hurt your face. Ain’t no ‘might’ about it!”

There are terrible consequences to being born three years late.

I crept through the kitchen to the back door and eased it open, dreading with each step a sudden attack from the rank, decomposed, dripping Farley.

I could practically feel the icy plunge of his terrible, ooze-coated blade ripping through the soft flannel of my pajamas as the door yielded to my timid touch. I leaned frozen across the sill.

No Farley.

But I knew he was down there, perhaps inches from the top of the cistern ready to leap from ambush once I stepped onto the porch.

“What are doin’?”

“AH-H-H-H-H!” I screamed and dashed back to the bed, running headlong into a dark figure that I knew must be Farley, knocking it sprawling to the floor as I scrambled back to the uncertain safety of the covers.

“Git out there!” growled Fred, getting up from the floor.

“You skeered the far outa me!” I said, peeking from beneath the quilt.

“I’m goan do more’n skeer you if you don’t git out there an’ knock that ghost back down in that cistern,” he spit through clinched teeth.

“But what’ll I throw?” I pleaded. “If we throw anything we got, mother or daddy’ll miss it, an’ they ain’t goan believe there was no ghost in that cistern.”

“Yeah, you’re right. O.K. Throw something from the Marshes’ side of the porch.”

“Plumb t’other side of th’ porch? That’s too far. ‘Sides, won’t they miss it?

“They won’t care. They’re nice folks. ’Sides, they’d let you if they’d knowed it was to git rid of a ghost! Now go on.”

This new plan meant that twice I had to risk exposure to Farley’s dread realm.

I had to pass the cistern on the way to find some missile, then actually approach the opening, the very yawning maw from which he might spring at any moment, upon my return to hurl it down at him.

The porch was a moonlit blue realm of unnatural shapes and shadows. My bare feet on the worn planks released a cacophony creaks and groans as I tiptoed across what seemed miles until I passed the cistern. Then something, who knew what, made a scritching, wet plop far in its depths. I dashed to the Marsh’s side, looking frantically for a weapon. A rusted toolbox. Maybe it would do. It was heavy. My fingers slipped on the dust-covered rust. I could only lift one end, but there was no time to find something else. I managed to hoist one end and drag it to the cistern. I more pushed than lifted it up the barely sloping sides, got my weight under it and, sprawling across the brick face of the cistern, worried it over the edge.

I never heard the splash.

There was half a porch, 15 feet of kitchen floor linoleum, a bedroom door, two quilts and a sheet between me and the cistern ere that toolbox hit water.

“Didja git ‘im?” Fred asked, sticking his head under the edge of my bedclothes shelter.

“I don’ know.”

“Whatcha mean, ‘You don’t know?’ Didja hit ‘im ‘r not? Maybe you better go back an’ see . . .”

“NO! I got ‘im! Busted ‘im smack dab in th’ face. He won’t be back no more!”

True to my word, we heard no more from Farley that night, nor did we for the next few evenings.

But eventually, his dank stirrings began again.

And again I hitched up my courage and my pajama bottoms to make my trepidatious journey across the back porch haunts. Each time I would fling another object down the cistern and dash Farley back into his tormented lair.

Once or twice, Fred actually made the journey himself.

Farley no longer ruled our lives, and we had a lot more play room on the back porch.

Meanwhile, all over Avery Elementary School, we gained the reputation as fearless ghost hunters. Every recess would find the Fisher boys out under the big sweetgum, regaling our peers with the latest skirmish with the dreaded Farley ghost, ending, of course, in another hair’s breadth victory.

Life was good again.

Until one day I came home from school and saw Mr. Marsh and my father standing out in the front yard, then overheard their conversation as I stood half concealed trying to look inconspicuous, invisible if I could have managed it, behind a corner of the house. A dread more terrible than any Farley inspired crept along my spine.

“I tell you, Mr. Fisher, I’ve never seen or heard of a burglar like this. He never takes anything valuable. An old toolbox I kept some window weights in. A singletree. Busted lawn chair, things like that. And you haven’t missed anything?”

My father recognized guilt even out of the corner of his eye.

“Son, do you know anything about this?”

I was caught like a fly in lard.

It would have done no good to lie.

I was never very good at it, especially to my father.

I blurted out the whole terrible Farley saga, now made truly terrible by virtue of our discovery. My father’s knowledge swiftly killed the Farley ghost, finally and irrevocably, there in our front yard.

Farley was no longer frightening.

Now he was just silly.

I thought Mr. Marsh was going to have a heart attack, laughing like that. Years later, even after I was grown, he would see me on the street and burst into fits of mirth, regaling any passerby within 20 yards with the story of that dull-witted Fisher boy and the ghost in his cistern.

I don’t remember whether my father spanked me.

I doubt it. My spankings were rare, but memorable events.

But I do remember what he told me.

Farley wasn’t worth much when he was alive.

Certainly less after he was dead.

His troubles were of his own making and his fate was sealed by his failure to deal with his misfortunes.

But I had made of him in death much more than he had ever hoped to be in life.

I had extended Farley’s troubles beyond the grave where they should have lain rotting and forgotten with him.

There are no such things as ghosts, he said, until people decide to make them real.

Ghosts are like toys.

We can take them out and play with them in fun. Left out and in the way, they are at best annoying and at worst, dangerous.

When we trouble others with our superstitions, we plague the world with our own foolishness.

And the fears of a fool are to be feared far more than any ghost.

 As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Thinkin’ is the cheapest way to travel.”

Texas Hero

And it occurred to me just now that I let the passage of Billy Wayne Justice slip by without comment last week.

I should have known better.

The Hon. William Wayne Justice was, if not the most decent man I’ve ever met, certainly the most honorable.

And the bravest.

He was all that is best about the law: it protects us from ourselves.

It would be easy to throw criminals to the wolves and forget that some of us are simply weak, some unthinking, some uncaring, some dangerous, but all human.

It would be easy until someone you cared about stood on the brink of the wolf pit.

Particularly now that we have learned that no small number of those he insisted we treat decently were, in fact, not guilty of any crime.

Judge Justice made the State of Texas simply be humane, even to the undeserving among us.

And we hated him for it.

He made us educate children who had no say in where they were born or where their parents traveled in search of a better life.

And we hated him for it.

He made us teach black and brown children together with white children to be better people than we were.

And we hated him for it.

His enemies were all the worst things about Texas.

But he was, taken as a man, of all the best things about Texas.

Weep not for him, but for ourselves.

Vote 4

Amendment 4 on your the Nov. 3 ballot will create a fund to assist “emerging” Texas universities’ research efforts.

That is, someplace other than College Station or Austin might have some good ideas.

And we might actually want to bring those good ideas to fruition.

As I write this, I sit within a stone’s throw from a new herpetology research center that collects,

analyzes, and sends snake venom all over the world.

If you vote against Proposition 4 next week, try not to get snake bit.

What have you got . . .

for sale?

James Dean’s former high school is selling the stage where he did his first acting.

Officials in Fairmount, Ind. have no idea what it’s worth, but they ought to get something out of the only famous guy from there.

Never mind that he couldn’t wait to get away from there.

A letter jacket or a senior ring, maybe.

But a stage?

Put that in your knick-knack cabinet

Jeez, people, just turn it into a museum and sell movie posters or red poplin jackets and tours of places he disliked most or something.

Speedy Delivery

Finally, we in the Wild Horse Desert have set a legal precedent of a sort this week.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has taken up the case of Amber Lovill, a mother who failed a series of drug tests, notably for methamphetamine, while on probation for check-writing.

Nueces County probation officers and prosecutors decided that was not the best of prenatal care and jailed her in a felony treatment facility until her little boy was born.

Fine, except there are some legal complications. (You’ll like this; nobody’s clean in this one!)

First, that ain’t what the average speed freak gets for urinating in the state’s cup.

Not that Lovill is a speed freak; she was just pregnant and, if urinalysis is to be believed, took some meth.

Probably no candidate for mother of the year, but felony jail time?

Second, is jailing a woman for doing something that might be damaging to her fetus a good idea?

Damaging like speeding on methamphetamine or damaging like speeding in an automobile?

Or smoking cigarettes?

Or lifting heavy objects?

Third, did the unborn kid have anything to do with the sentence she got, which was to have the baby where she could be watched.

By jailers.

Who might not be the best of all possible nannies.

Finally, is taking speed necessarily more detrimental to a fetus than being in jail?

Which might not be the best of all possible nursaries.

All of which leads us all to ponder the ultimate question: Is jail better than speed?

Or, is urinalysis better than my analysis?

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Doctors are not like outlaws. Doctors bury their mistakes. Outlaws bury their successes.”

 As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Doctors are not like outlaws. Doctors bury their mistakes. Outlaws bury their successes.”

It occurs to me that I have lived too long to be famous.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, it is indeed a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he’d been dead 30 years.

And if you don’t know who Tom Lehrer is, I have, indeed, lived too long.

But I still expect that whatever good I have done will be interred with Caesar’s bones.

Consider Shelley, Byron, Keats, James Dean, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jesse Woodson James, Billy the Kid, Alexander the Great, Évariste Galois, and Ronald Reagan.

No, Reagan didn’t die young.

He merely should have; proof that longevity is no friend of humankind.

Note what a friend death has been to Marilyn Monroe.

Now, consider the American health care network and its self-immolating success at the art of extortion.

Oh? What would you call someone who told you that you would die painfully and humiliatingly unless you paid them a great deal of money, even to the choice of bankruptcy or death?

You would probably call him, “doctor.”

Or an insurance agent.

Now consider this: What do you call the person who graduates last in his medical school class?

Doctor.

And if he’s willing to work cheaply enough, you call him an HMO-approved physician.

Still, the system has been extraordinarily good at keeping people alive.

With assistance from cleaner water and air, sewer systems located at greater distances from our homes, extermination and exclusion of vermin, regular bathing and foodstuffs that have enjoyed the benefits of refrigeration.

Has it occurred to anyone else that medical science takes far too much credit for our increased longevity, considering that the profession survived for centuries on the phenomena that most sick people simply get well on their own, regardless of bleeding, exorcism, and purging?

But we are going broke at the expense of medical science, or at least so actuarial medical science would have you believe, because we are living longer.

So some of you people are just going to have to die sooner so that doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies can continue getting rich.

Any volunteers?

Of course none of that is true of my doctor.

I like my doctor.

Which is why we choose our doctors.

From a list of doctors permitted by our insurance companies.

And we certainly want to be able to choose our own doctors.

With the advice and consent of a bunch of insurance company guys we know nothing about, who certainly have our best interests at heart, rather than just making a lot of money.

Which is why we prefer their judgment over a bunch of public officials that we can vote out of office if we don’t like the way they run our health care.

But I digress.

A reasonable person wouldn’t care whether he likes his doctor.

My doctor, for example, doesn’t know much about politics or baseball or woodworking or gardening.

Which makes him a pretty lousy conversationalist.

All we talk about is what’s wrong with me.

He’s not my friend.

He’s my most personal plumber and electrician; I hired him on the recommendation from a variety of sources that he is very good at what he does, and that he explains in lucid detail what and why he does it in my case.

And neither of us plays golf.

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Nothing is more confusing than the things you thought you knew.”

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Nothing is more confusing than the things you thought you knew.”

Don’t take the death of the Trans-Texas Corridor too seriously; Texans are still, as a group, pretty stupid.

Yet we are surprisingly un-stupid about some things, according to this summer’s opinion poll by the University of Texas government department.

But first, the latest sort of news about the Spanish Trace dreams of Lying Tricky Ricky Perry, the governor Texas didn’t want.

While Cintra-Zachary, the Madrid-to-San Antonio extortion consortium, won’t get all of the $3.5 billion in Texan’s tax dollars to build the full I-35 toll roads across houses, farms and fields, they’re going to get enough.

The contract has been canceled, but no one is saying how much money is already allocated to the Perry providers, those who directly or indirectly plan to profit from the toll road scam, the latter being everyone from Walmart, big businesses which won’t have to pay taxes to build and maintain highways; to rest area builders and operators with all those captive travelers.

Out-of-pocket guesstimates are around $100 million to Cintas-Zachery for work thus far, including Texas 130 (the toll loop around Austin).

Or enough to give a full four-year college scholarship to every graduating senior in Texas next year.

Not that we’d want something like that.

Especially considering that the end of the Perry era is far from certain.

Certain being a small town in East Texas very near Uncertain.

The latest Rasmussen Reports show that Aggie Cheerleader Perry and Texas Cheerleader Hutchison are in a virtual tie among likely Republican voters.

Forty percent for the girl with the megaphone; 38 for the guy with the pom-poms.

Nineteen percent are undecided and the rest support Debra Medina.

The margin is 3.5 percent.

Exactly the same results among Republican voters polled in April who said they thought Tricky had a good idea about seceding from the Union.

And that Pickett’s Charge was a sound military maneuver.

Those are the Perry or Perish Republicans, numerically identical to the 39 percent who liked Tricky Ricky in the last gubernatorial free-for-idiots election.

They will vote for him even if he’s in a coma or the penitentiary.

Considering the margin, all Tricky has to do is convince a handful of Branch Davidians that Medina is an illegal alien, and he’s in.

But the UT poll mentioned earlier may be more telling than Rasmussen.

First, it covers much more ground and measures Texans, not just Texas Republicans with blood in their teeth about the governor’s race.

Only 86 percent of those polled are registered to vote. Thirteen percent were not, and two didn’t know.

Yes, two percent of us do not know whether they are registered to vote.

And drive down the interstate with their turn signal blinking.

The most important issue in America, Texans said, is the economy.

On a scale of the most important issues facing America, health care gets six percent and immigration only four, but gay marriage, education, the environment and abortion are considered important by a mere one percent each.

Fewer people are concerned about gay marriage and illegal immigration than know whether they are registered to vote.

Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq incidentally, got zero percent.

When it comes to the most important issues facing Texas, however, 18 percent considered illegal immigration most important and the economy was second. Again, health care got six percent. The morality issues remained below the non-cognitive registered voters.

Now for some surprises:

    * “Intelligent” describes Barack Obama well. 70 percent!

    * He provides strong leadership. 54 percent.

    * Among registered voters, Perry leads Hutchison ten percentage points. No word on those who don’t know whether they are registered.

    * 64 percent of Democrats are undecided in the governor’s race.

    * Almost 82 percent consider poverty at least somewhat a problem in Texas.

    * 54 percent want the legislature to set tuition rates again, rather than college administrators.

    * 42 percent favor making college tuition affordable for all citizens and an additional 16 percent favor making it affordable to the most needy citizens.

    * We seem about equally divided on bilingual education for non-English speakers.

    * Only 32 percent oppose gay marriage or civil unions. 29 percent support same-sex marriage; 32 favor civil unions.

    * Only 51 percent are native Texans.

    * Only 36 percent know who Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is.

    * 90 percent claim some religious affiliation (24 percent are Catholic and 15 percent are Baptist; the rest are in single figures); 33 percent said they are “born again,” but only 18 percent say they attend regular services; 23 percent said they attend a few times a month. Ten percent said they are spiritual, but don’t go to church.

    * Three percent don’t know whether they are religious. Presumably, they looked to see if it was listed on their voter registration cards.

And finally, those who consider themselves Democrats or Republicans are equally divided, with 26 percent claiming to be independent. Most of those, of course, tend to vote Republican, although their support is soft when third-party candidates are available. The more looney the candidate, the more available the independents.

So why do Texans vote with such rabid right lunacy?

It’s only a guess, mind you, but I’d say it has something to do with fear.

A majority said they aren’t particularly worried about things politically. We’re probably going to be all right.

To the rest. WE’RE DOOMED TO PERDITION AND ONLY A SUICIDE MISSION TO THE HEART OF THE SUN CAN SAVE US FROM TAX-AND-SPEND NEGRO ZOMBIE ILLEGAL ALIENS!

Or maybe the percentage of those who do not know whether we are religious or whether we are registered to vote is greater than this poll indicates.

INFO

UT Poll

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/txp_media/html/poll/files/200906-summary.pdf

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Ain’t no tailors in th’ legislature.”

Ricardo Martinez picked his way through a broiled Gulf tilapia surrounded by chicken fried Texans and animated border stories conjured by the West Coast-New Yorker’s new film.

 As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Ain’t no tailors in th’ legislature.”

Ricardo Martinez picked his way through a broiled Gulf tilapia surrounded by chicken fried Texans and animated border stories conjured by the West Coast-New Yorker’s new film.

“The Wall” is a smorgasbord look at the politically rubbed-raw American immigration issue as varied and personal as the South Texas cuisine crushing the Kingsville bar table spread in front of Martinez.

He didn’t sample the dead cow slathered in library paste or the tacos al cabrón (pun intended), but he savored the experience shared with those of us who did, tolerated our indulgence, wondered at our wild appetites.

Exactly the way his film marvels at the horror and humanism along the Mexican-U.S. border.

Reared in Oakland, educated at NYU, Ricardo Martinez exhibits an openness in his film virtually unknown to an audience that sucks up to Michael Moore.

“I try to let people be who they will be,” he told a class of would-be story-tellers who had just made him their new hero. “I tell them that even though I may not agree with them personally, I want to give them the opportunity to tell the truth from their point of view.”

“The Wall” is a documentary.

It is no demonstration, no plea, no advocacy.

Rather, we watch a windshield tour of the 1,300-mile strip of purgatory between anticipation of salvation and acquiescence to despair, between lives in desolation and the United States of America.

We stop off for a visit with some graying, paunchy gun-toting “Minute Men,” lost souls pointing their cold, dead fingers toward the maw of hell, irrelevant and impotent unless they get in the way of the mastication.

“What’s wrong with being White?” asks their reality-show-run-amok spokeswoman, clinging dubiously to here contention that America is a White, Christian nation… and Jews, she concedes, clumsily deferring to Martinez, who she thinks must fall into some acceptable ethnicity.

After all, he can pronounce “cheese” and “chair” like a Native New Yorker.

We pass by the chewed-up, desiccated remains of those driven into the desert by the border wall, fallen on the pilgrimage to drive nails in Nashville or screed concrete in Cleveland.

We glimpse the gangs of one-time drug smugglers who have found it easier to prey on the scrimpings of immigrants, ironically victims of their illegal declaration by a legal system .

Martinez leaves it up to us to decide the moral dilemma of outlawing a man willing to ride freights and trek the desert for the dispensation of hanging drywall.

We follow a 40-year veteran sheriff  along that wall, a man who “has seen three generations come out of a manhole” trying to get under, over, around, through it.

If there is an answer to the bitter riddle of  the border, Martinez said, it is to let those who wrestle with it along the line; those usually the last consideration of American immigration “policy.”

Even in victory, the story of a woman whose legal battles drove Homeland Security out of her backyard, the family that saved its golf course from being walled off from his snowbird Yankee customers, of the cities and counties willing to tax themselves to build Rio Grande flood plain levees that the wall builder bureaucrats would have leveled, the defeat of a proposed 24-hour surveillance tower threatening to hold a small town under a federal microscope, the wall snakes its way across our path and leaves us, as we leave the theater, with a lingering, insoluble interrogative.

Can humanity live in a policy of exclusion?

To date this year, federal officials reported more than 1,200 breaches of the Mexican border wall.

For a showing of “The Wall,” go to .

Lies and Videotape and Sex Is Wa-a-a-ay Overrated