The Killing of George Floyd

No criminal was he.
but rather, the victim of one,
as on the video we see.

No violent man was he.
but rather, a disciple of
the Prince of Peace he be.

No vagrant was he.
but rather a tireless worker
for the Lord in eternity.



As the slain blood of Abel
cried out to the ground
up to the Lord a sound

So now does George’s breath
cry out to the atmosphere
for God, and us, to hear:

“I can’t breathe,’
cried he
as the killer
pinned George down
to the ground.
Now Big George’s breath cries out
from the ground,
a righteous sound!
On the net it’s found
around the world, all ‘round.

“A life well done, my faithful one,”
the Lord says to George
as Big George went home
never more to roam.

As for the one who pinned him down,
the writing’s on the wall
to be seen by all
all the world around.

Mene
Mene Tekel
Upharsin
Peres

In Mene appolis,
in Mene appolis
You forced him,
Derek.

The writing’s on the wall
to be seen by all:
“I can’t breathe!”
As America seethes.

King of Soul

Their Last Full Measure in Vietnam

A few years ago, I wrote a novel about what happened to America during the Vietnam war.
In my Baby Boomer g-generation, many of us went one way, and some of us went another.
Published in 2017, King of Soul told a story of what happened here, Stateside, on a college campus in 1969-70. In writing the book, I included scenes from Vietnam. To properly depict the challenges and hardships that our soldiers faced there, I retrieved, from several reliable sources, accounts of several battles.

In order to maintain accuracy and give honor where honor is due, I lifted and carefully rewrote a long passage from Dave Galloway's memoir,
We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and reporter/author Joe Galloway.
My rewritten account of certain events at the battle of Ia Drang is found in chapter 6 of my book. On this Memorial Day, I want to call your attention to the bravery and dedication demonstrated by our troops. Here is an excerpt of my retelling of what the "Lost Platoon" endured on that fateful day, November 14, 1965 :

       So Lt. Henry got hit; he was kneeling when he caught the fatal bullet. A few moments later, his replacement in command, Sgt. Palmer took a bullet in the head, was suffering and then a grenade landed nearby and snuffed the life out of him.
       The encircled infantrymen of the Lost Platoon were all on the ground now, unable to raise their heads because, to do so, and they knew it, would bring instant death. They shifted into defense positions. Suddenly a mass assault came from three directions; they slapped their M-16s on full automatic and mowed down the oncoming enemy.
       Now with eight or nine men of the platoon’s twenty-nine down, and thirteen wounded, they were caught under fire in a 25-yard perimeter. Medic Charlie Lose crawled from man to man, treating their wounds, amping up their resolve, boosting their courage, keeping the breath going in and out of their lungs, the blood running through their arteries, the pain down to a dull roar as much as possible, the bandages going on and the defensive bullets going out, serving up medical treatment and administering raw courage itself with all that life support.
       Sgt. Rob, platoon weapons forward guy, now in charge, had radioed elevations and deflections from the lost platoon’s position so that Specialist Vincent, down below, could help protect them with closely-placed mortar rounds fired from the LZ. When they ran out of mortar rounds, the mortar crews grabbed their personal weapons and started up the hills to assist Sgt. Rob and whatever was left of 2^nd Platoon.
       A hell of a lot of fire was raining down on the guys up on the ridge; the only cover they had was the rise of the hill itself. Sgt. Rob said to Sgt. Ernie we gotta get out of here; stood up, and immediately got shot in the head, fell over backwards on a log, the radio on his back. Sgt. Ernie, now in charge after Lt. Henry, Sgt. Carl and now Sgt. Rob had all gone down, reached under the log, grabbed the radio handset and called in more artillery and mortars. He told the guys down below he would direct their fire in as close as possible. The artillery guys never could establish the platoon’s position exactly, but Lt. Riddle could adjust fire based on Sgt. Ernie’s sensing.
       And that is what they did, shot mortar rounds all around the stranded guys, without killing them, but instead killing the NVA soldiers who were assaulting them from three sides.

I have appreciation for our guys who went over there and served in Vietnam while I, and many thousands of others, were skating through on a student deferment or a high draft number.
Over 58,000 of those guys gave their last full measure of devotion, so they never came back. On this Memorial Day, we honor them along with all the thousands of men and women who have defended our nation during these 225 years of prospering in Constitutional  freedom.



And to all you Reserve, Active and Veteran citizens of this United States of America, thank you for putting your life on the line for us! Keep up the good work!

King of Soul

Republeo and Demjuliet (Prologue)

William Sheepsheer hath undertaken a new play,

which will be performed by us from day to day.

Nowadays as we shelter, bumps on a Covid log, 

Cousin Will presents his play’s prologue:

Two polarities, both alike in indignity,

in fierce America, where we destroy our dream,

From political grudge erupteth Covid enmity,

Where pandemic vitriol renders sanitized hands unclean.

From forth the Covided  extremes of these two politicos

A host of vilifying fanatics whip up their rhetorical strife;

Thus do these locked-down, distanced foes

With their hostility destroy our national life.

The fearful spreading of this dread contagion

As the fierce infection of these factions’ rage, 

Which, made more lethal by our polarized ragin’

Is now the two months’ traffic of our national stage. 

And yet, if we with moderation could attend,

What the politicos do screw up—we shall strive to mend.

Our play will be acted by yon citizens in the land of the free;

It appears to be a tragedy, but needeth not to be.

To be or not to be—that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in our nation to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous politics,

Or to wear masks against a mist of Covid,

and by cooperating end it.

Glass Chimera

Through Faith and Patience

I would like to remind my fellow-Christians, we serve  a Savior who did not insist, nor fight for, nor allow his right-hand man to fight for, his constitutional rights.
Rather, he bore the punishment of a cruel civil .gov backed up by a band of religious zealots.

Jesus Christ did not argue with Herod, nor Pilate, nor Caiaphas. He already knew that his ultimate victory was assured, because. . . while allowing their bloody conspiracy to totally defeat his body, they were unknowingly setting the historical stage for the greatest human victory of all time—our triumph over death itself.
His world-class demonstration of how to prevail over adversity advances the purposes of God on this earth.
He did not nit-pick about his right to gather on Sunday or maintain any semblance of religion. In fact, on one occasion he ran the religious folks out of their temple.

He was telling them to get their priorities straight.
His most ardent spokesman later reminded us, through a written legacy, that  faith and patience would be the basis of our inheritance.
Not the promises of man . . . nor our legal right to get together on any particular day and play church. while the rest of the world is engaged in a life/death struggle.
We now have in the world a life-and-death situation that will ultimately demonstrate, like Jesus’s own ordeal, the power of our God to deliver us from evil, amen.
So let’s not cloud the issue by trying to split hairs over traditional religious whoodoos like what they think about what we can or not do on Sunday.

They cannot defeat us.
They can’t defeat the ongoing presence the risen Messiah in this world. His greatest life-affirming act was remaining obedient unto death . . . a death that erupted as Resurrection and changed the world forever. He was a man unjustly executed, but then he lived to tell about it.



And get this: they will never defeat his followers.
His victory was a world-changing event that greatly outweighs our power to quibble over freedom of assembly issues during a life-threatening pandemic.
My dear brothers and sisters, they cannot beat us. That’s been tried already, multiple times through multiple ages.
But they can still join us.

You can't beat down a man who survives death.

King of Soul

What we have Learned

(If you prefer to hear the spoken word, listen here for MP3 audio:)

What we have Learned

Now we are engaged in a great covid war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great media platform of that war. We have come to protect our institutions—our medical facilities and places of commerce, our recreational spaces and houses of worship, our business enterprises and residences—to assure our citizens of safety in their public paths through these gathering places. Those whose lives have already fallen under the infection of covid shall not have died in vain. Rather, let their untimely demise serve as a warning to us who remain. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Nevertheless, as we approach the end of Phase 1 of our long battle against covid, we find ourselves at a crossroads where some among us would persevere in their advocacy of dire measures to lockdown our mobile inclinations, while others of our citizenry would  demand release from them.

Yet . . .it remains for us the living, surely, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work through which these fallen do testify, by their very absence, of our need to persevere in the battle to defeat Covid-19.
The challenge ahead indicates a full-court press to oppose us— in the fateful minutes of the second half of our struggle against a teeming virus that dribbles feverishly against our most fervid defense.
At this critical moment of our offensive thrust, we find victory in the whizzing of our great  object through the last net of infection.



Thus do we celebrate the 3-pointer which, we hope and pray, shall be celebrated as our game-winner:

~ Six feet Apart—or Six feet Under!

~ Grab the Soap—Don’t be a Dope!

~ No need to Ask—Wear the Mask!

And I lay before thee  the great challenge before us in  such a time as this:
Whether by .gov compulsion, or by personal conviction,  shall we—shall we who are scattered like precious seed in the winds of time —shall we shrink from the dear prospect of adopting—whether voluntarily or by compulsion during these perilous days— these simple habits as a matter of common sense and common courtesy?
Nay, I say, nay, we shall not shrink from the task before us!

Send us your tired, your weary, your socially distanced yearning to be healed, so that healing of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth!

Glass half-Full

to be a Demublican

I was raised down in Louisiana, way back in the 1960’s. At that time in the Bayou state it seemed like everybody and their brother was a Democrat.
In 1969, I was Student Council President at our high school, and my buddy Doug Lambert was President of the Key Club.
When I moved across town to LSU, Doug and I were roomies for awhile and there was a lot going on on at LSU at the time.
There were, in fact some deep changes taking place on campuses all across the nation; students were getting more and more involved with politics.

I recently wrote a novel, King of Soul, about all of what was going on during those turbulent times. Take a look at it  my website below, or on Amazon.

In 1972, George McGovern was organizing his campaign to challenge Nixon’s presidency. Doug suggested that he and I stand for election in a precinct caucus to represent McGovern as delegates at a state convention, leading up to the the Democrats’ national convention.
Well there wasn’t much of nothin' that I can remember about that, except that McGovern did later get the nomination, but I wasn’t there.  He ran against Nixon and lost big-time
. . . which was kinda odd because a couple years later the American people ran Nixon out of the White House because of his shady dealings pertaining to the Watergate break-in and other quasi-illegal activities.
The groundswell of opposition to Nixon that resulted in his exit from office was a little bit like what’s happening to Trump now. However, a lot of the bad feeling about Nixon was probably directly related to his procrastination in getting us out of the war after he promised during the campaign to get us out of it.

Well somewhere in all that hullabaloo I got registered as a Democrat.
I stayed that way for more than a few years, although I was not into politics and voting during the period of my spousal search and subsequent raising of a young family.
Somewhere in the ’80’s, Ronald Reagan went over to Berlin and told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall. It was a great follow-up to Kennedy’s Ich bin Ein Berliner  stroke of genius, so I registered as a Republican, and I stuck with that affiliation for a quite a while.

We used to have a Republican party in this country; it stood for Constitutional law, free enterprise, freedom of religion, low taxes, and a respect for the right of every person and every family to make the best (s)he can out of what (s)he can get without a lot of interference from the government.
But nowadays I get the feeling that the Republican party has disappeared; it has been superceded by a bunch of yessir this and yessir that yes-men who form all their strategies around what the Donald says and what he approves of or does not approve of.

But hey. True leadership requires speaking to all the people all the time, invoking the traditions of this already great nation to inspire citizens to work actively in cross-the-aisle cooperation to solve our problems.
Leadership is not about evaluating policy decisions based upon whether the advisor, inquisitor or reporter is for you or against you based on some vague theory of fake news.
The only good thing that sticks in my mind about this current president is that he ordered our embassy in Israel to be moved to Jerusalem. I have always wanted a President to do that. Good move, there, Mr. President.
Nevertheless . . .
What we need now is a President who will not be distracted by useless judgements re: who is for him or who is against him.
In this present time of covid-crisis, we need a President who can truthfully say, as Gerald Ford did in 1975:

“Our long national nightmare is over.” 

Oh! if our current President could only manage to  make such a declaration legitimately, after actually inspiring us and  leading us into paths of healing instead of quibbling over who’s on his side or who’s on Nancy’s side.
We need a President who can say, as Roosevelt did in 1933:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

So I am declaring my affiliation now as a Demublican.
Maybe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate, as I did last time, or maybe I’’ll find a reason to support the Donald if he’ll straighten up and fly right, or maybe I’ll vote for Joe.
I don’t know.
Donald, see if you can get yourself settled down to actually lead this nation out of the Covid threat, instead of fretting over whether you’ll be re-elected or not, because your paranoid pugnacious politicism is screwing up everybody’s confidence that we can actually defeat this iinvisible monster.
Get your act together.
You too Joe! You might find yourself in the hot seat, come next January.
As Uncle Walter would say, if he were here:

“And that’s the way it is, May 10, 2020.” 

King of Soul 

Say it ain't So

These are perilous times in many ways:
Perilous pandemic
Perilous politics
Perilous protests
Perilous proclamations
Perilous pandemonium
Perilous publications
Perilous panic
Perilous parlance
Perilous pathogens
Perilous politicians
Perilous partisans
Perilous Powers

I heard a perilous report this morning. I found myself wishing some wise person would or could refute the perilous parlance I heard.
I was thinking: Say it ain’t so!

~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP are out to get us.
~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP unleashed the perilous pandemic with intentions of debilitating the US.
~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP place no value in human life.
~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP leaders are willing to sacrifice large swathes of their own people to the Covid just for the sake of having an alibi.

~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP want to dispose of many of their own old people because they’ve got too many of them due to their past one-child policy.

~Say it ain’t so: that Xi’s heroes are Hitler and Stalin.
Say it ain’t so!
~Say it ain’t so: that the CCP are willing to make a deal with Perilous Putin to debilitate North America with Covid and then divvy it up so that Ruskies can have Alaska back and CCP can grab USA to repopulate it with their presently overpopulated people.

Say it ain’t so!
~Say it ain’t so: that we actually have Americans who claim that our nuclear arsenal is obsolete and needs to be upgraded.

Say it ain’t so!
~Say it ain’t so: that any leader would even think about firing one of those damned warheads.
~Say it ain’t so: that we are headed for another world war.
Somebody please say it ain’t so.



Somebody please prove to me that all the above Perilous Reports are not true and they  could never happen.

More likely, however, than someone actually proving that to me is:
that I would do better to put aside this perilous rant and resort instead to a different “P” plea to hang my hopes on: 
Pray!
Pray it ain’t so.

Perhaps you'll join me. Pause for a word of Prayer for all People everywhere and for the imperiled Planet we inhabit.

P.S. If you are Chinese, and reading this . . . Please don't take this wrong way.
Have a nice day.

Glass half-Full