Super Bowl Weekend and The Capture of Champmathieu







Super Bowl Weekend and The Capture of Champmathieu

by

Justice Putnam

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

-- Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms

It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

-- Thomas Elliot

Super Bowl weekend and memories of past glories and defeats percolate in a dim corner of my brain. It is an ancient memory of blood and fire. It is the crisp wind across a cold, chalk-lined field; it is a howl on a hard city street; it is a bayonette-enforced order along a Guadalajaran desert path.

I don't really know why I'm wired the way I am; but I have my suspicions. I come from that place in the genetic code that cannot turn away from an injustice; that will act unflinchingly to right a wrong; that will protect the weak and infirm from the hostilities of man and nature. I come from that place in the genetic code that prizes Community and also Solitude; that meditates on Peace and Love; that will stand against Hate and Bigotry, not with the embrace of naive innocence, but with the calloused knowledge of the bruised cheek.

It is an equal measure of Nature and Nurture that makes us who we are. That place in the genetic code we come from is a powerful force indeed; but the landscape we are born into is a great teacher as well. There is so much brutality in that landscape, though, that the only sensible act is to have Compassion; and if one is fortunate enough to have the brains and brawn to stand strong against the Hate and Bigotry, then it is almost a duty to do so.

I'll be fifty-four towards the end of March. I've been fairly physical all my life, whether it be for work or fun. I tried to play football at Cal Poly Pomona in the 70's and was a semifinalist as a high school sophomore in the California State pole vault championship. I could run the hundred meters in 9.9 seconds. I ran the third leg on my high school's district championship mile relay team. I scored six goals in one game playing in a water polo summer league and was timed swimming 50 seconds in the 100 free. I would never travel without my surf boards and have caught waves from Big Sur to Costa Rica. I bicycled the Pacific Trail from the Sierra Nevada to the Washington Cascades when I was twenty-six. Along the way I scaled the peaks of Mt. Whitney, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Rainier. I sailed along the coast of California and Mexico on a 4-man catamaran the summer of 1974; and was a grinder on a racing yacht during the mid-90's in some regattas on SF Bay.

I dug water wells for schools in Honduras and built free standing Sonoma moss stone walls in Marin and Sonoma Counties. I have built homes and dug ditches. I have planted grapefruit trees and harvested alfalfa.

Of course all that physicality has taken a toll, for sure; four knee surgeries on each knee, a shoulder reconstruction, broken ribs, torn hamstrings, broken teeth and a few concussions.

But these injuries have never prevented me, at any time in my life, from coming to the aid of someone in distress; or turning away a mugger on a hard city street. I could never stand by and watch a woman being abused. I once chased away some toughs who were beating a gay friend. I have faced down racist thugs in Idaho and bayonette-wielding Federales in Guadalajara.

This landscape of brutality seems to exist on every level; from the street to the boardroom. People starve in cold alleys and freeze in hungry rooms while million dollar bonus babies wipe their ass with gold leaf 1400 thread-count cloth.

The only sensible act left is to have Compassion; to continue to help the down-trodden and the infirm. The only knowledge is that derived from that part of the genetic code that causes us to stand against the Hate and the Bigotry.

That is why I feel like crying. I fear that I helped in the capture of a Champmathieu.

I had finished my Night Audit shift at the Inn and rode my bike to the Montgomery station to catch a train back to Berkeley. A couple of months ago, one of the housekeepers was hit on the head with a metal pipe and had her purse taken. Maybe that was in some dim corner of my brain when I heard a woman's voice yell,

"Stop! Thief!"

I was off my bike and could see a guy being pursued by a couple of people. I had the same feeling I've always had in those moments; something is not quite right, somebody is being abused, someone is being taken advantaged of. Someone is being robbed and someone is getting away with it.

It's been awhile since I really head over heel in the air tackled someone. I had that same feeling I had during my gridiron days, whether I was running over someone on offense or tackling them on defense,

"I didn't really mean to hit you so hard, but, here we are!"

I looked up and a half-dozen store security personnel took over and hauled him away. His eyes met mine and he had a look I recognized as not being quite right.

Somebody is being abused, someone is being taken advantaged of. Someone is being robbed and someone is getting away with it.

And then I saw his great robbery; this act that caused me to impulsively act at the mere mention of Stop! Thief! The act that caused him to be pursued by a half-dozen security personnel:

He had stolen a can of fucking Pringles! The man was hungry and I helped his Javerts capture him.

This is the landscape of brutality we live in. Million dollar stock bonus babies need to buy jets and eat sushi off the torsos of nubile twenty-year olds; while a man is charged with the crime of hunger.

Someone is being robbed and someone is getting away with it.

I can't stop crying and no amount of contrition can absolve me.

(Champmathieu is a vagabond in the Victor Hugo novel Les Misérables who is mistakenly accused of being the convict Jean Valjean and taken for trial in the Arras superior court after supposedly stealing a fruit-laden bough from an apple tree, and being positively identified by Javert and three convicts as Jean Valjean.)

© 2009 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen



posted also at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/31/15943/0541/477/691101

The Vast Wright Wing Conspiracy






The Vast Wright Wing Conspiracy



by

Justice Putnam


Malcolm X had just sent another reply to another Instant Message from Thomas Jefferson. Adams, even though a neighbor of Jefferson's from across town, had replied more and more infrequently these last generations to even regular snail mail; so Malcolm took up the slack. Though Adams was enthralled with the modern Navy, he hated texting and the internet tubes. Nixon, Reagan, Hoover and Jackson never replied to Jefferson's missives; and he had sent them many. It was probably because mail delivery is rather spotty in Hades. Plus, there is no broadband there and interference from the heat disrupts the wireless signal. Kennedy and both Roosevelts carried on an infrequent correspondence; and Lincoln as well, but they were engaged with other pursuits in heaven, so Jefferson and Malcolm X began to Instant Message each other daily. After all, they lived only light years away from each other in Limbo; wireless is free, the signal strong and never disrupted.

It seemed Jefferson was worried about Obama's chances for the Presidency with this Reverend Wright oratory causing such concern.

T-Jeff: "I'm afraid my southern brethren will take the good reverend's rhetoric all too personal."

Mal 10: "As well they should; I'm still picking shards of Plymouth Rock out of my skull."

T-Jeff: "But that's the point, my good friend. Plymouth Rock may have landed on you; but they landed on Plymouth Rock and need to feel grateful. Reverend Wright is not respecting their gratefulness."

Mal 10: "It's hard to respect folks who will put you in chains, crush your dreams and keep you separate, inferior and feared; and then harp that you are not grateful enough for your good fortune."

T-Jeff: "I was just speaking with Sally about that this morning when she was washing my clothes. I could tell she was getting a little snippy when I corrected her grammar and spelling on a letter she was writing to Martin Luther King. After all I've done for her, she seemed a bit, well... ungrateful. Then it struck me; if not for the economic necessities in the forging of this Nation, she might have become the Queen of The Congo that was her birthright."

Mal 10: "That's what I like about you man, even though you're a manipulative, white landowner who is formed by the Enlightenment; your profession of guilt keeps me in this amorphous corporeal state so I can continue to point out the inequities still!"

T-Jeff: "Well, my dear friend, I'm not taking the bait. But I'm still concerned about this Wright fracas. It's important for the survival of The Great Experiment that Obama convince The People to vote him to the Presidency. Bringing up that the Black Community was infected with HIV and flooded with drugs by the government is a little over the top, no?"

Mal 10: "On this we agree, I find it impossible that a society and government that would infect the Tuskagee Airmen with syphilis; who would test insecticides on black communities; who would impose poll taxes, literacy tests and voter ID laws; who would buy drugs from the Contras to sell guns to the Iranians; who would incarcerate black men at rates that are astronomical is capable of such heinous acts. Reverend Wright is surely stretching it a bit."

T-Jeff: "So what can be done about this Wright Wing of the Black Community?"

Mal 10: "It's surely a conspiracy, another tactic to disenfranchise the Black Man. I'm not disagreeing with Wright's premise, mind you. I was a target in my day; hell they went after Martin the way they're going after Jeremiah. They'll use any means necessary to achieve their ends; even if it means using our words against us, even if our words are the truth."

T-Jeff: "Yes, you are correct. It is a vast conspiracy. I feel so helpless, though. Not quite in hell, but definitely not in heaven."

Mal 10: "I know what you mean, man. I know what you mean."

© 2008 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen


cross posted at Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/30/32853/1788/276/506192

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The Princess and the Frog

by

Justice Putnam

______________________________________

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

-- Socrates

_____________________________________

She said she chose me because I was the best behaved in the whole pond. I guess those etiquette lessons my frog aunts taught me when I was a tadpole really helped. All those Saturday night Brown Derby dinners dressed in my little tadpole-sized frog tuxedo, my frog aunts in their pearls and gloves, all seated in our special Brown Derby frog booth, somehow all that prepared me for the chance of a frog lifetime; to be kissed by the most beautiful Princess in the world.

I must tell you, everything we frogs heard was true. The sun back-lit her dark red curls, her full ruby lips touched mine. I remember she tasted of lavender and orange. The transformation was magical; I was no longer the ugly frog. I became her handsome Prince standing tall and strong and happy!

Oh, sure. She had to change my wardrobe and make it more diverse, as a Prince’s wardrobe must be. I was mostly into turtlenecks because I thought it would hide my frog throat more. But she liked the open collar look, she said, because she liked how manly a strong neck was. I always thought my best feature were my legs! Such is the mystery of the most beautiful Princess in the world.

She insisted I grow my hair longer. I took to sporting a goatee and wearing little round sunglasses. I grew accustomed to jet lag on royal visits to her ancestral homes in Europe.

I became her Prince, but she seemed unhappy.

We had just returned from a weekend at the home of my best bullfrog friend. His property included some of the best mud baths in all of Sonoma County.

“Your frog friends are ill mannered and uncouth,” she sobbed, “they smack their lips when they eat and use terrible grammar. You must choose them or me and if you choose them, you will not be my Prince!”

I didn’t know that the spell could be reversed. I thought, once kissed and transformed, a Prince forever you would be.

“Are you serious?” my Bullfrog friend spit at me later when I told him of the ultimatum. “You think you’re a Prince? She’s too good for you, man. She’s way out of your league. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You might be a Prince, but in your eyes, not hers! What made you think you could keep a woman like that happy? I hate to hurt your feelings, but at least you have feelings to hurt!”

All of my frog friends practice “tough truth,” but knowledge of that has never lessened the sting of their observations.

A note sat on the table when I came through the door that hot afternoon. She had gone and would not be back. I went to the bathroom and looked at the mirror there.

I knew which fork to use for the salad and how to swirl a vintage red to check its legs. But there was no mistaking it.

I had always been a frog.

But now I was one with a goatee and little round sunglasses.

© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

Kurds And Weigh

by

Justice Putnam

________________________

(Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds & whey.

-- child’s Nursery Rhyme)

____________________________________


The Barsanis are a clan in the Middle East. Every nation in the region has persecuted them. I don’t know enough about all the particulars, but in a culture of Gypsies, the Barsanis are the gypsies of the Gypsies in the Middle East.

I don’t really care to know more than that. It would just interfere with my job. It is a challenge to administrate to such a stubborn population, for sure. But I was put in touch with another graduate of RU Right who now works in the Department of Education, but used to visit Africa as part of her church’s wildlife fund, anyway! We had a fellowship by e-mail and I found out she’s a Goodling too, just like me! Anyway! She pointed out that Wildebeest roamed the Savannah since biblical times and so did the Kurds around the Holy Lands!

Put that way, I understood completely. But I still had to figure out how much drayage of human pounds moved over the square miles I had to factor for.

I must confess, I feel a little like Noah's personal assistant at times. After all, the Company is a little like the Ark. There is going to be a flood, and the Company is building the infra-structure for the survival of the Exalted Few. It is rapturous to know that by working for the Company and graduating from Regent University, or as we alumni affectionately call the school, RU Right, and even more importantly, being a Penitent Goodling, that I am part of the Exalted Few, that I have a seat on the Ark.

Praise be to the Lord!

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. I had to figure out how much human tonnage roamed over the square miles that I was to factor.

I saw a nature show once when I was a little girl that showed the animals of the bible and I remembered how Wildebeest would stop for water along their grazing routes. That was important to me, because I once worked for a major hamburger chain and I would provision supplies for outlets that had major sales along well-traveled commuter routes!

Now this is getting easy! Because all I have to factor for is a soft drink syrup for the region. We already have the local bottlers in place.

Who knew that the right prayer circle would get me a job with more pay and less work?

Praise be to the lord!

Anyway! For some reason, the Company has decided to factor supplies by “human tonnage” than by Point of Sale Units. I’m sure it has something to do with accounting for the upcoming Government Contract signing. I have another friend from RU Right, and another Penitent Goodling, too! Who works for Homeland Security and she says her department always uses the heavier approach.

When dealing with Government Contracts, she said, the heavier the sound of the documents hitting the table when dropped from one foot above the surface, the more important the document and likely that passage would occur. No one can read that much business jargon, so very few do.

My report will generate more paper than just a Point of Sale analysis, so this is a really important Government Contract, I can see! It is so wonderful to do God’s Work by adding my small part. Of course, that is what makes me a Goodling.

Praise be to the Lord!


© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen