A Note on Writing Like a Man

Both men and women artists and writers must, in my opinion, sort out motivations.

On the one hand, there is the sheer pleasure of making something from a well constructed and bigod, grammatically correct sentence above a low upper bound of complexity, to a limning on a gesso ground of “the nimbus of the baptized God” in tempera, to a musical improvisation of serenity power.

And then there’s the thought of Recognition which sounds cool unless you happen to talk to a real “celebrity” or a therapist who specializes in their care. Ponder upon Lindsay Lohan.

There is in other words a tension in Hegel’s chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in his rib-tickling and almost, but not quite, incomprehensible Whopper, The Phenomenology of Mind.

The chapter as expertly boiled down by Alexander Kojeve is nothing more than a story about a boxing match, a Thrillah in Manila, at the dawn of history. The Master and the Slave fight for mutual recognition but fighting is not, as Mom would know, a way to get it. So the Master puts the Slave to work, and history starts.

The slave, however, gets the last laugh because like me, like my brothers or my Dad he learns the anhedonic yet real satisfaction of working his ass off, and seeing his Humanity reflected in a well-wrought computer program, a brain free of cancer, or cars delivered without a scratch (harder than you might think) in a blizzard.

The Slave makes the World while the Master is kickin’ it.

So…as an artist or writer or musician, ask yourself. Do you seek Recognition or Work?

OK, now, as to writing.

I discovered that my writing when I was 13 got Recognition, a scarce good in my family of origin, from Mom and Dad. But I also discovered what most poets know.

You can’t sit down and say, time to write a poem. Yes sir, let’s get to work.

You need a Form, a daemon. And that can be anything from Alexander Pope’s bright idea of completely transforming Homer’s sea-washed, wine-dark Greek to trumpet and drum 12-syllable rhyming couplets, to a sudden association of words, like the French word for bread, and the English word for pain.

Or some irony, such as the Brits meekly sailing away from Hong Kong after having left a pearl of great price in the form of the rule of law, dammit.

It can also be a sudden need for spare cash and a demand from a Shickander for a low entertainment involving a Magic Flute.

Now, my own daemon was I only wanted, after my early experience, to write ABOUT something. I found it uniquely hard to read most quality fiction because in my imagination, the authors of quality fiction were creating worlds ex nihilo, worlds of feelings and I couldn’t connect, I wouldn’t give myself the time.

A work of fiction had to reach out and grab me in the manner of Pop fiction. In my twenties, I encountered Frederick Exley, a drunk who was too, well, drunk to write more than one good book, A Fan’s Notes, and I connected with his half in the bag celebration of drunk-assed Chicago and the Near North side of the 1950s for I drank in its ruins.

Or George MacDonald Fraser who failed, just barely, to be Pop. He was too smart and his books never made it to films, there being only one bomb made with Malcolm MacDowell as Flashman at the Charge. And there is addition to great scholarship a darkness in Flashman which makes it hard for Pop audiences, who want clear cut good and evil.

Writing made no sense to me unless it was about something outside writing. I could write huge reference manuals for the software I created, and beautiful comments inside source code.

But my book, “Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler” (Apress-Springer 2004) hasn’t been commercially successful, and there were times when my ability to write good manuals got me in actual trouble.

Back in the 1970s, software and hardware came with great whacking books. I found it amusing to study the book before taking the machine out of the box or installing the software.

But in 1984, I bought an early Macintosh. I was guided not by a Book (I cannot even remember if a manual was in the box) but by simple sheets of paper and clear images on connectors that either fit or didn’t, and when they fit, they did so nicely. It was almost a religious experience.

Today and as a result, you get images and a few words (in many languages) when you buy an iPod. It can be rather frustrating to wait as most new iPods charge up and Apple, rather blithely if you ask me, expects you to have Internet access. D’oh.

Everything comes down without words from the Cloud.

This was a general tendency in software. My 1970s “vision”, if that is what it was, was more me as the Scary Guy on the Monitor in the 1984 Mac “Super Bowl” ad. I’d be the writer of the Law. But precisely as the ad came out, I myself was changing, and looked more like the girl runner in my red shorts running around what’s now Google Headquarters, and identified with her. As I learned real customer service working with Bell-Northern Research engineers, I gave up my dream that software was a form of dual writing, both code and verbose English.

The best software self-documents.

But I still like to write practically and about things, starting with things. In teaching writing I teach the five senses approach. It’s hard to teach writing in China! Students are told to suppress their voice, and then thrown into required classes in writing and many teachers want to blow their brains out after trying to teach writing here.

I have had, on the fly as it were, to create a distinction between adjectives that only seem to be sensory but have a high “judgmental polarity”. For example, “beautiful” is a word like “good” such that it’s good to be good, and almost always good to be beautiful (save in a tragic fairy tale).

But try, I say, to assign a tertiary color to morning. It’s more “evocative” (explain that word!) to speak of a BROWN morning than a PINK morning. I don’t tell the kids what’s lurking in my brain, that this has a reason in information theory, for the very good reason that I confusing enough as it is, and my reading in information theory is out of date.

The mistake most teachers of writing is, then, not finding something for each student to write with passion ABOUT, and not extracting hard information-theoretic information. What color is the morning? OK, she’s beautiful, so what? I mean, is she Alice in Wonderland beautiful or Mulan beautiful.

It is stepwise refinement whereas educational “authorities” in Hong Kong and world-wide expect us dregs to throw the whole thing out at once. This is because most ESL teachers and education majors have no mathematics.

I have just enough to irritate most mathematicians save John Nash, who was beyond being irritated by much at all, and to whom I spoke minimal words, having been admonished by my boss at Princeton to watch my ass.

Mathematics (especially in the Intuitionist tradition of Brouwer and Heyting) is about stepwise refinement to any scale including infinity. The numbers in a calculus sequence converge to something that drives you crazy because you have to understand it as “the smallest real number that is greater than zero” (don’t try this at home).

The software program is in the words of the late hero computer scientist Dijkstra “a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing in harmony”.

Likewise, you can teach kids to write like Shakespeare: have them write a thought such as “school sucks”, “Bruce Lee”, or “kill teacher”.

Then show them how to add connective, adjectives or nouns stepwise to get

My school doth suck so much that I could spew

The Dragon kicks the ass of triad guys

etc. You have to teach that a verb can be strengthened with “does”, etc.

It is stepwise, and it works better in one on one tutoring as opposed to classes, but one on one is too expensive for many parents. In a classroom I use the projector to walk the kids through the process.

But the bottom line is that writing, especially for boys, has to be about something out there.

For example, US Grant, the Union general who won the Civil War by turning it into a meat grinding prototype of WWI, was a very good writer. But the only reason Grant wrote was, during the Civil War to draft accurate instructions that he knew could get people killed, and later in life, to write his best-selling Memoirs while dying of cancer so his family would have some money after he passed.

There’s a rather touching story about this. Grant, in many ways always a holy fool, accepted Charles Scribner’s standard contract without change, doubtless to the amusement of the flash chaps at Scribner’s, for it was tacitly a baseline designed so that Scribner’s wouldn’t get screwed by greedy and less competent authors.

Mark Twain, a friend of Grant, read the contract and marched down to Scribner’s, threatening Scribner with mayhem. Twain got a much better contract for old Sam.

The result? Grant’s writing, like that of another writer for the workaday world, the holy traveling salesman John Bunyan of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” is hard and solid like a rock.

His dispatches during the Civil War, wrote under great pressure, are in their own way works of art. Hegel saw Napoleon at Jena, and wrote, “the world spirit on horseback”. Well, here’s the world spirit at Vicksburg:

“Sherman’s advance has reached Bridgeport. His whole force will be ready to move from there by Tuesday at farthest. If you can hold Longstreet in check until he gets up, or by skirmishing and falling back can avoid serious loss to yourself and gain time, I will be able to force the enemy back from here and place a force between Longstreet and Bragg that must inevitably make the former take to the mountain-passes by every available road, to get to his supplies. Sherman would have been here before this but for high water in Elk River driving him some thirty miles up that river to cross.”

Note that old Sam could write a conditional sentence. Here, he knew damned well that a second rate general like Ambrose Burnside might not be able to hold a first-rater like Pete Longstreet.

Perhaps, and I’m going out on a limb here. The usual military leader, such as the clowns who got men slaughtered in World War I, may not have been able to construct a sentence properly that starts with “if”, and the arcana of the subjective, of possible outcomes in the dark rain, may have given them the willies as, in the rear with the gear, they’d wrestled with the fact that you don’t use the present tense in a subjunctive, you use the infinitive.

So they write “hold the line”. Their syntax consists of sentences that start with the active verb which means that the men under them are given no choice, like the second wave at Gallipoli in Peter Weir’s film of that name.

CEOS are in my experience the same. They arrogate to themselves “simplicity” as if they are gurus who’ve learned so much that they now know It Is All So Simple. But they do not.

I teach girls as well as boys, of course, and am guilty of focusing too much on the bright and attentive girls in the front row while letting the gangstas in the back do their gangsta thing.

But. Identity politics and being of a fashionable age, race and gender takes you only so far. I love reading and teaching nonwhite non male and young authors but this is not enough, any more than being a white guy was enough in the nineteenth century. You have to write ABOUT something.

Amy Tan writes about the reality of being ABC (American Born Chinese) which is unique, of course, since the basic problem is that while you might get Chinese language lessons, there’s no opportunity to use it except to fight with your Mom. This is parallel to the problem of my students in “The City of Sadness”, Tuen Mun and Tin Shui Wai: they get English classes but no opportunity to use it.

Xialu Guo had the marvelous idea of using Chinglish, while learning English herself, to write a novel (A Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers) and make some money, for she was already a successful author in Chinese: “Immigration officer holding my passport behind his accounted, my heart hanging on high sky”. Bingo! We understand it since we’ve all had that experience as expats: your heart does hang on high sky as the plane comes down, low and slow, over increasingly lower buildings, industrial buildings, pools of green slime, and then the runway, or the immigration officer, a half hour later, holds his stamp hovering above your passport (sometimes I think they do that for fun).

A very literate and highly intelligent Chinese friend loved that book when I showed it to her for its Chinglish replicates Chinese thought and language. The way it comes together is completely different from English and its Latin based complexities. It is thought more “down to earth”, but that is wrong. In fact, it can be more subtle and refined than English because its monosyllables and ideograms are what might be called Chomsky Type Zillion, very, very sensitive to context and ever changing for that reason. As best as I can understand in my ignorance of Chinese (I really should try harder to learn it) they are like pools of water that reflect each other. Is that right? Damned if I know.

But … as a white American male I have to write as such while also being a human being (reconciliation of levels). I don’t pander to women; there’s a very amusing, and very vile article about this in Taki’s very amusing and very vile webzine: pity I was booted out after nuking John Derbyshire’s racist garbage, I’d be coming in low and slow with snake and nape on the former article. Boom. Mushroom cloud.

The article about men who pander to women say they do so in a last ditch effort to get laid which is amusing and in a way true. We do, and we need to purify our hearts as artists and do art as a final end in itself (next stop the ding an sich: next stop eternity), a Krapp’s last tape.

Note: John Derbyshire ain’t my friend. But he also has cancer. It’s not as if I should have been kinder to him; he was wrong; fathers should never counsel sons to run away from anything. But, if he ever makes it back out to Hong Kong I would be honored to buy him a beer at the Island Bar on Lamma Island. For we are all mortal and we all treasure our children’s future, as Kennedy said.

Final notes on John Derbyshire

You have two tasks on entering an Internet flame war. First you must defend your thesis with logic, wit and grace. Then comes the second-order exchange in which you defend your rep.

Once those tasks are complete, you have won.

“The game is done, I’ve won! I’ve won!
Quoth she, and whistles thrice” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

I thoroughly refuted John Derbyshire’s Talk:

1. The stated purpose can be accomplished in a color-blind fashion by replacing “blacks” by “ruffians”.

2. Since black on white violence is not enabled (quite the opposite) by continuing discrimination but the reverse is and for this reason is far more savage and pointless than instrumental black violence committed in the course of robberies by the poor, the fact is that black parents should give their Talk but Derbyshire may not give his pompous fucking little stem-winder.

A difference in behavior that goes against the previous grain, with blacks perhaps a bit more aggressive and whites less, is in fact what Martin Luther King died for. Whites should feel guilty for in American society, uniquely, whites continue to benefit from white skin privilege.

I then exhibited rather than argued for the thesis that I was simply smarter on the topic than anyone else. Indeed, a paradoxical situation emerged, one characteristic of America.

It was actually admitted that I was smart and creative, yet, in the “Jacksonian Turn” in American politics this was dismissed as somehow, in some way, not pertinent given the universal feeling that Derbyshire was Authentic, oh so Authentic, and was doing a blessed thing in using his classy accent and British mannerisms in the service of the sons of soil and toil.

The “Jacksonian Turn” in American politics may be usefully compared to the era, in Britain, of that drunken sprat Pitt the Younger, for it was in that era, too, that poets and essayists like Byron and the forgotten Hazlitt called upon England to be finer than she was, vote for Charles James Fox, and accommodate the Frogs of all people. They were justly celebrated yet unlike the earlier generations of poets lost their leadership of society. This is because of what a Marxist would call the increase in productive power.

A British first rate ship of the line such as made mincemeat of the French, or a Yankee clipper ship, were elaborate technical devices. Almost overnight, men had to be part of something vastly more powerful than they.

The speed and maneuverability of a ship of the line paradoxically relied absolutely on individual men doing far more exacting tasks far better than their forefathers on some lumbering caravel, lashing things up any old way, devising ways to save steps and have some serious time to quaff.

The “story” of Regency England is, in a striking way, one of the talented individual who is bullied and brutalized at sea or on land (like Sharpey by Peter Postlethwaite’s character in the Bernard Cornwall series) but who recognized and culled out by a higher officer…the last part the comforting fiction for most of the lads just died screaming, didn’t they. The same story, which is a proto-industrial story and not a time out of mind story at all, is repeated on Yankee clipper ships which, unlike say Pirate ships (which had as their goal the enrichment of all), had as their goal the “more rational” enrichment of landlubber investors, and on those ships men had to exercise an equally high degree of skill.

I’ve sailed on an old fashioned ship and they generate tasks not essentially different from operating a cruise missile. You must self-abnegate. You must “read the fucking manual”. And your reward is exclusively a pay packet no more. This is the way things are, and in this world, the poet is not by any means the legislator, unacknowledged or not, no matter what that damned fool Shelley said. At precisely the moment he said it it stopped being the case. Milton expressed precisely what most men felt in 1649, Shakespeare did the same in 1599.

But in 1801 in Britain and 1826 in America, Keats and Emerson expressed precisely what most men did not feel, damme their eyes, unless they were in love, and modern marriage takes care of that.

Inner direction or direction from poets has become the exception, AND on the Net, white males seek the approval of self-appointed alpha whites.

Interestingly, where Taki Theodoracopulos is the main cheese ball at the site where Derbyshire posted the Talk, a poster whose ID was taki247 posted a unique stream of foul abuse that in my experience was characterized of mobbed-up rich one per centers in New York when their income is threatened.

I replied asking if this was “the” Taki, a God come to earth out of concern that this Daemon with this weird name, this Nilges, was soiling the Temple of Taki.

In response, the posts from taki247 disappeared but then posts from Guest started to appear. All of them shared measurably the same homophobic and brutal literary style so perhaps yours truly got Taki’s thong bikini in a tangle.

[Note that if I'd only come out of the closet, I'd get more tolerance. Dang, but I'm not gay, and again, WWII destroyed something in western man. Perhaps gay men simply find relief in doing things like wearing tights, which DH Lawrence and I know are far more comfortable than trousers, and modest than kilts, and writing poems, whereas today, to be a real man you have to be a lout.]

But I care not. The original Derbyshire post has enabled and activated any number of disturbing characters, mostly pretentious young white guys with the cold eyes of men with at least the potential for mass murder, who cheer him on and Derbyshire’s soul will stand sore charged if one of these creeps opens up on blacks on some pretentious little Southern campus.

It has always puzzled me that fighting a flame war to win in a good cause is thought weird and disturbing, for the First Amendment surely values speech over the gun.

And Trayvon is only the latest in a series of well-publicized white on black confrontations which the media carefully stages to confuse and dazzle, and which the black man, owing to the lack of legal resources, always loses.

Derbyshire makes much of being a cultured man. But for me, the message of something like Al Capone crying at the opera in The Untouchables or the Nazi playing Bach is clear.

It is that aesthetic propositions (culture) are lexically subordinate to ethical propositions and that you cannot listen to the B minor mass if you’re a murderer or a racist. Period.

And quite as opposed to being the inheritor of a culture, men like Derbyshire and Taki vomited all over that culture in the 1960s and 1970s, spending Daddy’s money, whilst I was starting a family and doing my best to passionately engage, against the grain, a field I basically hated, that of mere computer programming.

These guys were screwing underage girls and snorting coke while my ex was pissing and moaning that I worked too hard, so it’s repulsive today that they pretend to be grave and wise.

Furthermore, Derbyshire is just a silly man, with his PayPal “give me money” button. I know he has cancer so perhaps the button is justified. But to actually post an extra role in a Bruce Lee? Give me a break. If he only got one offer here in Hong Kong, he probably had no talent even as an extra and had trouble showing up for work. I’ve had several extra film, TVC, extra and live theater roles since 2005.

The white male today feels himself, deep down, ineffectual and a loser, so of course a white male who posts with any old fashioned vigor, using metre and rhyme and quotations from Seneca is a rara avis and like the Albatross, like Carthago, delenda est.

It IS one thing to fight fair. But long ago, perhaps in WWII, that broke down because as Sean Penn says in The Thin Red Line, today a man means nothing…altho Penn’s character didn’t quite realize that an ordinary GI had to master an extraordinary number of tasks, from field stripping a carbine to taking out a Panzer without air support. This in fact is why parental precepts today are so very different than as recently as the 1950s; the only measure we have left isn’t accomplishment or decency it is survival and wealth.

Parents used to lay down simple moral rules. One of them was color-blind and another was to avoid ruffians, but another was to stand your ground if necessary, especially for boys.

But my generation of parents counsels in the Randroid register. Morality, even deferral of gratification, is instrumentalized and is concerned with the child’s self-preservation and flourishing at the expense of all others at all costs.

The result? The members of the Duke LaCrosse team! They didn’t rape the sex worker merely because they were already so drunk as is the fashion with louts they couldn’t get it up. They said “we wanted whites not n-rs”. Their Daddies destroyed a public prosecutor for doing his job, in an adversarial legal system, in a way that would have been praised had the defendants been black. And the louts were praised.

My father would have found this strange.

The result? Zimmerman. Irrespective of the facts in play, we know that Zimmerman as the son of a judge was morally and financially downwardly mobile, and instead of getting a law degree he got the gun as a shortcut to masculinity and Trayvon is dead.

My father would have called Zimmerman an “ape”, for when my father used that word, he meant it in the German way which was mostly color blind. My Dad had been raised in the Depression to work terribly hard and to repress impulse, and he was appalled by our TV-maddened greed for junk food and toys. Owing to his influence, in 1962, I made a vow, taken out of Love Labour’s Lost, to be monkish and studious only to fall victim of a Catholic OCD that was in turn healed by my encounter with Aeschylus.

During my Yuppie asshole phase I’d had a fight with my wife and sought counsel from my Dad, complaining that the black parking attendant had delivered my car late and this was why I missed an appointment with “that wretched Anne thy wife”. My Pop said, “you’re no better than a n-r if you treat her like that. Shape up and be a man.”

With my own kids I tried to inculcate equally grave saws despite my sense of futility and their smart remarks. For I did make an impression with my saying “men, women are people” and other wise saws and modern instances.

The Black Talk is only one Talk given in African American families. The rest of their talk is, perhaps these days to a greater extent than in the case of upper middle class whites for whom their Little Darlings can do no wrong, how to shape up.

We had to be careful, tutoring homeless kids in New York, not to criticize the kids’ performance to their parents, for the parents would savagely beat the kids if we said anything bad. It is a fantasy that poor people are lazy and selfish; that’s what rich people are. Poor people are generally highly judgmental and harsh but with little result.

George Bush gorged himself, George Bush bullied Jeb, George Bush flunked out, and somehow, tragically, his father never could be a true father for GHWB, simply to get rich, had betrayed New England and what it represents: a decency that does not discriminate between the personal and the political. As a result thousands of Americans are dead. The wind is beginning to howl from hell here.

Derbyshire’s talk is pathetic racism, and if I have to channel, as I channeled at the sites, William F Buckley and Rudyard Kipling, if I have to rip a new asshole in the clapped out culture of the weary white West, then hark, forward, you chaps.

Has it come to this? Self preservation a virtue alone? Well, it is at that juncture that empires fall, as did the British empire start to fall at Amritsar in 1919, where because of fears of Indian retail attacks on white women, Brigadier Dyer opened up on women and kids: to channel Kipling:

Reggie Dyer he said “fire” and the Ghurkas blazed away
For “better safe than sorry” was the order of the day!
Better a Lee Enfield round that splits a babe in two
Than we be at all discommoded, and the Union Jack, red white and blue
And I understand from beyond Life’s bitter strand that your elitist Troops
Are under orders to kill kids that witness their Special “Oops”!
‘E’s a kid but e’s a Wog, so Sergeant gun him down
You can always get acquitted for shootin’ the black or brown
Or failin’ to protect the wimmen fleein’ Sarajevo’s savaged downtown!

And over in America, that once was so fine and brave and free
The judge’s son is an executioner in downward mobility!
And a thin red line of bozos protect the rest who always flee.
It’s a strange and darkened world that from Valhalla I do see:
One that had some Glory once but now weeps in misery.

Now, Darby-shir knows this in some corner of his Being
He ain’t no dumb bastard, ‘e’s an educated cunt:
But I’d ask him to refrain both now and in the future
From invokin’ that head case Churchill, if I may be permitted to be blunt.

For like ‘Otspur said to Glendower, when upon these spirits you do call
They may not come in serried Rank your side to save the day
They may not come a-throngin’: they may not come at all.
Instead, “why did you call us from our eternal sleep?” those warriors they may say:
“We have no conception of your world in which you don’t mean ‘happy’ when you say gay:
And your ships no longer use wood or coal, they use a goo that’s runnin’ out:
And your Son is not a man ‘e is a lager lout.
We ‘ad a world of novelty which we ‘ad to figure out:
And the only thing that remains isn’t Knowledge and it isn’t run away:
It’s to do the right thing to your fellow man to prepare for judgement day!”

Edward G. Nilges 16 April 2012. Moral rights have been asserted, and apologies, to Kipling’s ghost, rendered.

John Derbyshire’s “Talk”

Ex Hong Kong resident and film extra, ex computer programmer, quondam author of popular math books, and ex National Review writer John Derbyshire has written a disgusting essay at Taki’s Magazine, called The Talk: Nonblack Version.

The feebleness, the utter feebleness of a word like “nonblack”: it makes perfect sense to a little computer programmer but shows Derbyshire’s conflict. His views are a minor key and yes, feminine, yes, girlieman, yes, girly girly GIRLY version of REAL Nazi, KKK speech: there is no bright line that divides a feeb like Derbyshire’s pathetic word choice “nonblack” and “White and Proud”, because in both forms of language the speaker assumes that white men can do folk anthropology and not get the shit beaten out of them, hopefully in some verbal way by a guy like me (who has indeed come in low and slow over the site for a good pounding of Derbyshire’s logic) but perhaps in the old style.

But I realized after making a smoking ruin of Derbyshire’s insane thesis a basic male contradiction. It is that he wrote this pathetic attempt at a genteel racism (where the genteel racism of the White Citizens Councils of the 1960s in the South was a direct enabler of murder of blacks and their white allies) when Trayvon Martin was killed by the downward mobile and not so genteel son of a judge using a “Stand Your Ground” law.

These laws make gun owners the law and they were why Trayvon’s murderer wasn’t arrested.

But Derbyshire counsels flight when his son sees a crowd of blacks, even if they happen to be The Black American Mathematician Club waiting for a table at Denny’s near Duke University so they can check a brothah’s proof of Riemann before they all put it on the Web (word to Derbyshire’s Mama is that I was present at the transformation of Nash from schizo nutbag in the ignorant eyes of the world to Nobel Laureate, and word to his Mama is don’t count them chickens, dude). Derbyshire counsels his son to flee if his son has a fire extinguisher and sees a black man whose car is on fire.

The “construction of masculinity” here dates to World War II, that event which Richard Yates, the alcoholic author of the novel that became the film Revolutionary Road called the Father that you could never please. During that war, “real men” gradually realized that only losers went back to the front when they could use racial and class privileges to stay in the rear with the gear, and Hemingway in Paris.

Losers…like Edward Joseph Nilges, 1915-1945, KIA 6 April 1945, Mt Folgorito, Captain, 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Nisei: Go For Broke), United States Army, Silver Star and Purple Heart, who appears to have traveled back to the front when he did not have to after getting a Dear John letter. Who may, and I am speculating, been assigned (as Van Johnson’s character was assigned in a 1950s film about this Nisei unit) to a Japanese-American unit because perhaps, and I speculate, like many of the MEN of my family, he simultaneously was good at what he did but also a pain in the ass…not a good ole boy at all, who never got the word about schlamperei, baksheesh, and sucking up to the right people.

Derbyshire (as the countless anonymous posts from in all probability the “good fathers”, “loving husbands” and “professionals” indicate) enables America’s odious return to ante-bellum race relations, so I posted this poem about his cowardly Talk.

Not with a Stand Your Ground bang, son
Rather flee the scene with a whimper:
If you see de Black Man, run, son
He probably wants kill yer.

But Father o Father, my role model Dad
Is that not womanish, feeble and sad?
Should I not Stand My Ground like a man with a gun
And not from el Paredon run?

No! You young brute that conduct does not suit
We are white scholars not made for the field
We are the red-tabbed planners in the rear with the gear
When the Reds overrun us we yield

The losers like the Scots Guards in Korea
Threw bully beef tins when shit out of ammo
The winners know when to run in real terror
Out of the field do we go.

But Father o Father that name on the wall
You traced back in Washington on the green mall?
Your brother rejected that job in Japan
And went down in flames o’er North Vietnam

And before that I know that he went to the South
And registered voters thought worthless uncouth
To him the Reds were as bad as Bull Connor
And right or wrong he had some real honor

Shut your mouth be quiet and do as I say
What are you? A man? Or maybe you’re gay?
A real man is smart and knows when to flee
And screw the brave and the fine. It’s all about “Me”.