I am going to saunter into this little foray, playing with words, being as insulting as I can possibly be as I casually mosey from issue to issue, savoring each egg I crush.

Intellectuals of the left wing ilk, bombast a righteous attitude of superiority over the common man in a dozen ways. They lord it over all with their feigned appreciation of the ‘finer things’ in life, with their Opera and Piano Concerts, their ‘theatre’ and entertainment associations, and especially with their Bohemian lifestyles heralding such things as promiscuity and prostitution, alternative life style as gay, lesbian and bi-sexual, flaunting social convention and tradition, and of course the age long use of narcotics, from opium to absinthe and cocaine.

The first intellectuals were probably those born weak and puny with poor eyesight, who could only exist if others cared for them. Thus they became the marginal, ‘go-fers’ of the vital and productive tribal members, existing by begging and stealing left-over’s.

But, having excess energy, as they did not work, their minds developed more so than their fellow man and they learned to exist quietly and stay out of the way of others.

The first ‘true’ intellectuals were most likely the Witch-doctors, sooth-sayers and medicine men, trading on their powers of observation and manipulation, deceit and fraud, to achieve a ‘status’ in the group.

Always seeking ways to ‘please’ their Masters, as they were incapable of ruling, they became a necessary adjunct to formal religion and the King’s Court. Their beady little myopic eyes facilitated the ability to be scribes and painters and again, they served their Masters bidding in every aspect.

This pretty much continued up until the Renaissance and then the emergence of a wealthy trading class and the Industrial Revolution.

When posturing for the glory of King and God began to wane and a trading empire emerged and the power and wealth began to shift base from the Church and the King’s Court, the poor lost intellectual turned ecce bono, where the money is, to the wealthy upper class.

Oh, how they hated toadying to the crass materialists, but, what the hay, it was a living.

So…they became the teachers and the lawyers and the writers and the bohemians, still selling their services to those who could pay, and internally corrupting everything they could in their life of discontent.

Then, finally, to their salvation, on a dark and dreary night, the god of the collective was found in swaddling clothes in a manger somewhere on Piccadilly street in London, Lo and Behold, a new king is born!

Thus it has been e’er since, the intellectual confronting the vital and producing members of society, parasitical in nature and clever and crafty as they continue to corrupt the young and helpless.

So, if you wonder the truth in ‘why intellectuals hate freedom’, that I posed some time ago, that might give you a brief idea or at least something to think about.

I had intended to present a rather scholarly document, based on Bertrand de Juvenal’s, essay “Treatment of Capitalism by Intellectuals” contained in a book edited by F.A. Hayek, “Capitalism and the Historians”, but this was so much more enjoyable..

Hope you enjoyed it.

Ahem…

Amicus…

Ayn Rand & Robert Heinlein

My daughter emailed me yesterday: “Dad, tell me some books to read, I need something to think about…”

No, I didn’t give her Rand and Heinlein, nor even Hemingway or Steinbeck, instead, I suggested Ann McCaffrey, “The Rowan” & “Pern” series, Wilbur Smith and Nevil Shute Norway, perhaps seventy five volumes between them that I have read; should keep her reading for a while.

But somehow, her inquiry touched off a perusal in my mind of the writers that had most influenced my reading over a half century of time and I decided on Rand and Heinlein as the most likely culprits.

For those of you who hate Ayn Rand because your high school teachers and college teachers told you to and have never read her, may I suggest, just for the hell of it, that you read Atlas Shrugged?

When I first read Atlas, well over a thousand pages, I was thrilled to meet the leading characters in the novel, Dagney, Hank and Francisco, as young people and follow their growth and maturation through the pages of the novel, fascinating and greatly impressed that such people ‘could and ought to’ exist.

As I was young, barely eighteen, when I first read it, young and impressionable, I struggled to follow the motivations of the characterization of the ‘good guys and the bad guys’, so easy to determine in my superman comics, or Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, like I said, young and dumb.

But I could not put it down; I stayed up two whole days and nights at my much slower reading speed then and read the whole damned thing in one sitting, with much coffee and cigarettes, aboard the USS Greer County, underway in the Pacific.

I was never quite the same afterwards.

Heinlein is a different story. If I was intellectually challenged by John Galt, my masculine ego was massaged by Heinlein.

I think it was Lazarus Long, in “Time enough for Love”, a man who lived 2500 years, that kept me smiling throughout the book. Heinlein wrote characters that were a, ‘man’s man’, a capable, strong, competent, moral and mean son-of-a-bitch, that would protect your back in a fight and seduce your wife if you turned your head. I liked his characters.

So, yes, were I to be asked to name the two most influential writers I have read, it would be Rand and Heinlein.

Amicus...

Slow Dancing all by herself…

When one sees a gentle wind caress an unending field of tall wheat into undulating regular and natural waves of movement, one can sense the rhythm of earth’s natural laws and the beauty displayed

Another aspect is the easy and regular rise and fall of small wind waves on a sandy beach in moonlight or sunlight in mist and fog, rising and falling according to the pull of gravity and the push of the warm wind.

Both added to by the scent of sea and plant, the sounds of wind and wave, the colors of ocean and field combined into a total greater than the sum of the parts; a feeling, an emotion from within, natural, fulfilling, quietly awe inspiring causing breath to change and commingle with the elements.

The room was muted with laughter and tinkles and a piano, bass and guitar. The room was lovely with the ebony Grand, the yawning top pegged open. The carpet was thick and luxurious and color matched to compliment mahogany and cherry bookshelves and framed mirrors surrounded by similar warm polished woods.

Those present were dark coat and tie and formal dresses, long and short and multi-color scattered in two’s and three’s, like tall and short moveable obelisks with appendages slightly out of focus and impressionistic to the eye.

And there she was.

A single focalization in an alcove out of sight of most; behind a formal leather chair of deep dull black leather and arms.

It seemed she did not move at all by any human means, but swayed and undulated like the field of grass or the bosom of the sea.

Her eyes were closed as I silently and slowly moved closer; her head swayed from side to side and her chin lifted in silent response to chord changes and notes in the high range of the instrument.

I felt I was watching a woman in a bath, unclothed, face raised to cascading liquid that caressed her body as it coursed around and down and away.

The white satin silk of her blouse stretched and relaxed across her breasts and beneath her arms down to her wrists and tightly to her throat as the slow sinuous movement consumed her body oblivious to me; to all but the music and her thoughts.

Her dress was dark blue and belted, tight across the front and back halfway down the marvelous surge of hip, clinging to the slow thrust of thigh against the willing material that swirled and shifted as she swayed.

Barefooted, she fondled with her feet the texture beneath with toes splayed and flexing with sensual intent.

Her face was delicate and dreamlike to my eyes, with high cheekbones and a clear forehead touched by tendrils of dark hair that joined the dance and lovingly soothed her skin. Her lightly colored lips slightly parted and I could feel her breath in rhythm to the rise and fall of her chest and the beating of her heart in her neck; of course I could not, but I did.

From side to side in slow motion her hair fell thus and thus in gentle waves of softness and scent I could sense from afar, though I yearned my face to know.

Her shoulders as if being caressed, moved to unseen hands, responded to unknown thoughts of amorous content; or so I imagined through my eyes and into my thoughts.

I felt myself matching her moves in miniature, in micro movements of my body complimenting the ebb and flow, the rise and fall of her celebration of movement.

A final sustained resolving chord and the final thump of the Bass; the music stopped, her eyes opened, green and warm.

“I felt you arrive, inside the music.” She said and smiled and lowered her eyes.

I was prepared. In about every way I could think of. Even sighted in the British 303 scoped rifle; it was manufactured in 1912, for the First World War.

The campsite was near Swift Creek Reservoir in south central Washington State, near Mount St. Helens before it popped its’ top. However, late in the year, at that altitude, there was snow and it was cold.

It was just the perfect place to hunt. I had been on a tree planting crew the previous summer and saw a herd of Elk; knew where they fed and watered, had the spot all picked out.

It stayed warm in the cab of the four by. I sipped coffee from a thermos, smoked a half a pack of cigarettes, knowing I was downwind from the blind, behind a stump and a windfall. Deer and Elk are not dumb animals. They have a sense of smell that can detect a human odor and certainly burning tobacco.
The Bull is also a bit crafty. When they come out to feed at first light, the Cows and the Yearlings venture cautiously out from cover to the open areas to graze; the old Bull holds back and watches.

It was time. I quietly buttoned up the truck and silently made my way down a gully and back up to where
it would be about a hundred yard shot from the heavy cover fronting the meadow. A quick check for the license and tag, patted the blade on my hip and went through the details if and when I made the kill.

One never knows. Some hunting trips you never see a single animal.

The gray dawn brightened enough so the tree line became visible. Low clouds and flurries and trailing wisps of fog sculptured the scene in an eerie way; there was absolutely no sound besides my deep and regular breathing.

Another ten minutes or so and details became clear across the meadow; the third time I thought I saw movement, I did.

A good-sized antler less Cow made a step and stopped, ears twitching, head turning side to side.

Slowly, one by one, the females ventured out. It seemed like the newest one took over guard duty as the ones before lowered their heads and browsed. I counted nine animals in all, three smaller ones among them.

Papa Bull was slow coming out, but I knew he was watching and listening and sniffing the breeze; I could feel him in my bones.

Then…one minute he wasn’t there, the next minute he was; majestic in his size and the rack of antlers that swept back and forth as he surveyed his cows and all around them.

He circled around them. Herding them a little closer together but moving into fresh grazing areas a little at a time.

Then it was time.

There was the shot I was looking for. Broadside, just below and behind the shoulder, a heart shot.

I couldn’t pull the trigger.

He was too beautiful.

A boy child wandered through the tall grasses and fruit trees and wondered with amazement. He feels and sees the dew damp leggings, clinging and cool and the gentle breeze wafting through his unkempt hair and across his brow.

He lifts his face, blinks at the brightness, covers his eyes with a hand and watches the birds and the fluffy white clouds chase each other across the quiet blue.

His reverie interrupted by the slamming of a screen door; a sound he knows that hurries him to the fat Jersey cow staked out to pasture.

His cheek pressed against the warm flank as the beast chews, the warmth of teats in his hand, the sound of firm streams of milk pounding into the stainless steel pail; he thinks yet again of the chores that remain and watches the yellow barn cat that can catch a stream of squirted milk across the straw laden floor.

Carefully the near full white frothed pail to the back screen door recently announced and upon the counter by the hand water pump. Milk strained through cheesecloth carefully poured into the glass gallon jugs boiled the night before and carefully again into the ice box.

A quick check of the wood cook stove he started before the sun was full up and the pot bellied, chimneyed one in the living room that warmed the dwelling. A quick cold hard home-baked biscuit from the night before and out the door, carefully handing the screen quietly.

The wagging dog and a licked hand, a gathered flock, impatient as the Rooster challenges and the hens and chicks complain. Eggs gathered and set aside, fed and watered; he latched the hen house door and spoke name by name to the rabbits he would have to soon kill and skin and freeze.

A motherly smile and loving fingers taming impudent locks and breakfast as the dining room filled and children laughed.

He smelled like the cow all day in school. Only the city kids sneered; the farm girls smiled and giggled at his ragged jeans.

At seventeen the boy went away on a huge grey Naval vessel. He served with honor but knew there was more and went off to seek.

He wandered and saw some of the wonders of the world and loved and lost and cried and felt fear on dark nights on the Kansas plains when not a car saw his thumb all night.

He saw enough and knew there was more…

The boy child wandered through the tall grasses…carefree, barefoot in ragged jeans; glanced over his shoulder and did a running summersault on the gentle earth. He laughed out loud and threw a small stone, accurately against the bark of a Cherry tree. He turned and gave a thumbs up and a huge smile to the world at large.

A man with a woman by his side, arms around, watched with pride as the boy ran and jumped and explored his new found world.

They smiled.