The Retreat of Norris and Mcmanus: A Post Modern Civil War Novel

By Mark Alan Norris

From 18611865, the Great American Civil War raged. It is generally taught as though it were a well-scripted movie with a definitive beginning and end. Images and stories from the horribly littered Gettysburg battlefield to the Appomattox surrender from General Lee to General Grant have all the trappings of a powerfully executed drama, and with the coda of Lincolns assassination, the story could not be more complete. But while the massive engagements on the innumerable fields of battle were relegated to the history books and museums, the hearts and minds that fed the fire that nearly consumed the country have never truly surrendered.

In 2008, with the election of a descendant of the slavery system to the highest office in the land, it seemed the perfect moment to finally declare, once and for all, that America had healed itself from that wretched war and was ready to fold the flags for goodat least in a poetic sense. Sadly, it turned instead to be the beginning of a shabby sequel to one of the greatest films ever made.

In 2015, weve come to view divided as the new norm in American society: red state and blue state. And while it might make for good television, it has left us with a lousy, dysfunctional society. This novel is drawn from both Civil Wars. If you enjoy a good yarn filled with the incredulous that simultaneously addresses the politics of the present, you hold in your hands a rare treat. So get your flags out, get loud and get proud, and rock this bad boy for all its worth!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514427651

Mark Alan Norris

Mark Norris is an artist and author living and working in Echo Park, California, since 1988. Other novels include Art School, Now Hiring Smiling Faces, and Wicked World. He is rumored to have played in the bands the Filter Kings, Poetry Attack, and the Hostages from Hell.

Book preview

The Retreat of

Norris and

McManus

_________________________

A Post Modern Civil War Novel

Mark Alan Norris

Copyright © 2015 by Mark Alan Norris.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/16/2015

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Contents

Unanswered Prayers

A Cause For Desertion

Farewell My Lovely!

Change 2008—A House Redivided

The Clinch Mountain Foot Beaters—The Making of A Deserter

Blue Ribbon

The Boots of Petersburgville

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down—President McCain: Part I

Johnny Fucked—A Plan

Feelin’ Good—Who Needs Health Insurance?

Love Letters

Sky Fall

The Battle Of Old Little Big Hill

Talk To Me

Go West Young Man! (The California Plan)

President McCain: Part Two

Return Correspondence

Out of the Sky and Into the Dirt—Road To Maryville

Sunday, Sunday (just can’t trust that day)

Roadhouse Blues

Buckleville Astonishment!

The Seven Deadly Sins In Action

Shiloh For Dinner

Right Wing Circus Circus—2011

Honor Bound

Soft Parade 2012 (The Island)

Escape From Maryville

Soft Parade II (The Chief)

Last Train To Clarksville

Soft Parade III (Welcome to The Romney/Ryan Express)

Pine Riding Breakdown: Shiloh Version

Soft Parade IV (Jethro Tull)

Leviticus For Dinner

2012—Revenge of the Downtrodden

The Colonel’s Homecoming

Soft Parade V (The Russian)

Last Supper Blues

Soft Parade VI (Heat Wave)

Out of the Fire and Into the Wilderness

Death Paneling

The U.S.S. Tom

5 Iron, 3 Wood, and Putter

Heroes

Messages For The Departed

Revenge of the Billionaires

U.S.S. Tom—Part II

A Letter To Vicksburg—Dear John Edition

Mrs. Montgomery Hits The Road

Down The River

Uncle Tom’s Travails

Soft Parade VII (Liberty Street)

Prairie Dog Village

Soft Parade VIII (Clean Up On Aisle 7)

A Hand Job For Pemberton

They Were Wrong

Back In The Saddle—Yet Again

Ferguson Follies

End of The Line

Go South Young Man!

Here We Go Again

The Next Train To Clarksville

The Songbird of St. Louis Comes Home

Soft Parade IX (Good-Bye)

Come Hear Uncle Tom’s Band

The Last Civil War Casualty*

End of The World Blues—2008 and 2012

Family Tree (Reunion) 1865-2015

Red of Red’s Tavern—I don’t go in much for novels and such—too long, too much junk in ’em. I like the newspaper best. Sports pages. That sort of thing.

With apologies to Howard Bahr, Ambrose Bierce, Shelby Foote, Charles Frazier, Drew Gilpin, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, William Styron, and the many other true Civil War writers and chroniclers of that era whose works and talent have given me tremendous inspiration that is most likely not represented here.

For Hale Pearcy, Rest In Peace

Unanswered Prayers

An early cold spring whistled through the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That vast invisible force rippled everything in its realm as it moved from valley to peaks to prairies in the east. The only hope for warmth lay in the hint of morning’s direct sunshine, and it was only a promise at this point. Two hard traveling campers suffered on the ground. They were counting on this resurrection of light every bit as much as the millions of acres of fauna and forests surrounding them. Three years earlier these campers, Marvin Norris and his partner, Dennis McManus, had found themselves in similar, yet very different circumstances—and many was the time they had shivered waiting for sunrise…

Back then they were on several battlefields of the great American Civil War, 1861-1865, and faring badly as Union soldiers. Much had happened during those years of agony and glory, and reflection had not yet had its due… The night before, just as their tiny campfire was dying, President Lincoln lay unconsciousness in far off Washington D.C., shot in the back of the head. They wouldn’t know of this tragic exclamation to the end of the War Between The States for quite some time, and one of them would never learn of it. They were in vastly remote territory and it was fairly safe to say they were lost. Still, they’d been through worse—much worse.

As winter receded, and passage through the Rockies and onto the gold fields of California began to seem possible, these two deserters from the Union Army made their way along the slightest of trails. Were they animal trails? Indian trails? New grass crunched underfoot in persistent frost. They were low on supplies. They were always low on supplies. They’d nearly been killed by Indians three different times. The natives viewed them as invaders, which they would have found amusing if their situation wasn’t always so dire. And yet they marched on. Worse? That was a frequent topic between Norris and McManus because they were in possession of so much shared history that qualified as ‘worse’.

Petersburgville, or that Bible dinner donkey fucking? asked the rhetorical McManus. He still moved with an awkward gate, stumbling as much as moving forward. Rickets as a child had set him on that path. Both men sported a layered contingency of clothing, some borrowed, some stolen, all close to played out. The mismatched layers of various furs and cloths could only be considered ‘practical’ as there was no fashion aesthetic to be found. To top it off, both of them sported well traveled Union forage hats in varying degrees of suffering.

McManus kept his hat for its two bullet holes and the testimony it gave to his ‘good luck’ and survival skills. After all, most head shots end badly for the chapeau’s owner. And while McManus was always the larger of the two, he was no longer heavy—lean times and hard traveling will do that to a person. As neither of them had been close a barber of any sort for well over a year, rangy beards and long unwieldy hair framed their weather and struggle etched faces. That both of them were just beyond the age of thirty would have been completely lost on persons of upper urban society. "What? Fifty? Sixty-five? Why, that ragamuffin prospector is positively ageless!" Even in 1865, these travelers were more appropriate for a Natural History Museum diorama than a society gathering in the finer restaurants, or saloons of wicked San Francisco.

A three quarter moon was still high in the clear morning sky. Norris, who was never large, now resembled a rangy, two legged rat dressed for an abolitionist stage production of Les Miserables. Although his teeth were in far better shape than they had any cause to be it was an inherited trait, and not usual for the sort of adventurers that they had become. Pertersburgville was worse—the number of boys lost that day was unspeakable; however, in terms of sticking in your mind and never letting go, that Bible dinner mess was something else… Norris heard something and cut himself off.

There! A rustling in the trees and brush ahead of them startled both. A huge black bear with her cubs reared up, sniffing viciously. This little family was just barely out of hibernation, and took notice of them from 30 yards away. There were a couple of wild shots fired, and then an attempt to climb a tree. Norris scrambled up while McManus felt the claws of the bear ripping into his back. Hot rivets of pain shot from his twisted mouth as he was yanked from a branch. He fell. A muffled harumph! issued simultaneously from both his ass and his mouth as he was smacked into unconsciousness, and then soundly mauled to death. The ripping and roaring were accompanied by wild bits of scalp and flesh smacking into the broad trunk of the tree.

Norris gazed down in stunned horror, a condition he’d visited many times during their three years together, a condition seemingly without end… Although it was against all odds that they had made it even this far in their mission to escape the war and seek out a better existence, Norris was incoherent with shock and sadness. He should never have interrupted Nigger Tom’s dinner prayer, he whispered to himself, knowing nonsense when he heard it… The bear made brutal work of his friend’s remains, her cubs playing with his head and ripping the ears free. Norris hugged the trunk, and gripped hard to the branches out of reach of the avenged bear. He wept into the bark of the Ponderosa tree that had saved his life, but could not save his friend…

And so the adventure of McManus had reached its conclusion, as must all at some point. He had survived the Civil War: from the training in his home state of Indiana, to the battles of Old Little Big Hill, Petersburgville, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Vicksburg … but not the final retreat. And those were the very words that Norris found himself carving into the tree trunk a day later when he was able to attend to the bear ravaged remains of his friend. I guess he’s done running, and now I must be on my way, said the bearded, little rat man to himself. And on his way he would be, visions of the California gold fields still churning in his war ravaged mind.

Though he and McManus had suspected that they were deep into the California lands already, they were actually only a three day walk from the burgeoning town of Sacramento. There was even gold to be found in the creek they had just drunk from that morning … if they’d known what to look for. Norris picked clean the useful items from his partner, including a few gold pieces that had been hidden about his person. He retrieved the hat of McManus—finally at rest—and smiled a sad, wistful smile as he poked his finger through one of the inexplicably survived bullet holes…

And then he remembered as fondly as he could how it had all occurred.

A Cause For Desertion

Some ways into a battle all sense of time is lost and the decimating chaos of combat does nothing to secure its return. Well in front of him, Norris watched the line of men he was supposed to follow. In a normal year any one of them could have been plowing these cleared and rolling hills. A spring rain had fallen a day earlier, and the soil would have been loosened and prime for the blade. Thick clouds carved with gray flirted with the walls of forest that rimmed the fields. The woods served to remind how barely tamed this part of the world was. In fact, most of the natives who had lived there before the European invasion could still have found their way around. However, they would have avoided the events of that day—masses of white men with all manner of guns and shouting always ended badly…

The fellows to the front of Norris were churning and charging toward the ‘enemy’ in their navy blue uniforms. There was a crackling of musket fire. The somewhat well ordered line developed holes with the spinning and dropping of first casualties. Had this been going on for hours or minutes? The bone cold of the morning was never shaken, but it was forgotten in the fear of the moment. And then the cannons did their work. Prodigious sound and flame uprooted enough men for a good sized poker game along with a satisfactory amount of dirt for a large family garden. As the bloody remnants drizzled from a patch of dark gray sky above the howling began in earnest. Amazingly, the majority of the living pushed forward as commanded to fill the place of the recently ravaged. And those fresh uniforms, so sharp on parade the week before were now horribly rendered and defiled. The pain of broken, ripped, torn skin was ignored as the boys knelt, aimed, and discharged their muskets more or less on command. Another whopper of an explosion left everyone deaf. Norris turned to flee. He had already witnessed the end of two fellows he’d been marching with for weeks, and now a man without a face reached for him. The poor fellow was still in possession of most of his teeth, but his eyes were black festering holes. Blind, he grabbed the lapels of Norris’s suddenly filthy Union coat and appeared to be howling as well. Norris heard none of it, and would have no more of it. He turned and ran. He ran through the smoke, the broken animals, and the grotesque couplings that all bled wildly. At that moment, in the deepest recesses of his mind as well as in his shallowest flickering of awareness he realized that he was done. He had never wanted any part of this war to begin with, and now it was finished… Had this raw experience been going on for a minute, or an hour? His timepiece had failed the previous week and its only use was sentimental, but even that would fail to be meaningful should he join the ‘exploded’ of battle. He ran unnoticed among the scores of others who were not ready for the fire and the fury being unleashed upon them that morning. We’re beat! they yelled, stating the obvious and also reinforcing their decisions to flee. It’s all done! We’re beat! And my how retreat does love company…

But the commanders had other ideas. Stragglers were rounded up and reintroduced to the concepts of patriotism that should have gotten them through this horrible ordeal. The cannons were realigned, and before anyone could yell, "Shenandoah!" the fight was on again. Well, for most of them. Shouting, howling, clinking and clacking, popping musket fire and the boom of cannons accompanied the push. Soon many who had changed their minds about retreating saw first hand they’d got it wrong. Norris had never changed his mind, and kept moving further away from the wreckage, west and towards the wood.

Farewell My Lovely!

(The Making of Private Norris)

Colonel Walton Carmichael, of Buckleville, Ohio, was the guiding force behind Marvin Wilkie Norris enlisting in the Union Army. And while Norris would not have been described as brave, or soldierly by any who knew him, the Colonel was another story altogether… He had been a late bloomer, not even graduating from West Point until he was thirty-five years of age. Oh, but he took to soldiering and the ways of war with tremendous vigor.

Fifteen years previous in 1846-7, when Walton Carmichael was still a Captain, he had fought with distinguished comportment in the Mexican American War, for which he was promoted and heavily decorated. Of the Captain’s many heroic acts during the Southwestern Expansion, his capturing of ‘The Leg’ was the most highly regarded. It had belonged to General Santa Anna—the nemesis of Texas, the Alamo Killer, and leader of the Mexican Army. When an early morning attack nearly bagged the General during the famous Battle of Cerro Gordo, he and his entourage fled in panic. Captain Carmichael, with a troop of Illinois soldiers under his temporary command, followed in hot pursuit. And though the General managed to escape, the boys from Illinois captured the carriage holding his intricate prothesis: a leg carved from Tujunga manzanita and inlaid with Oaxacan gold leaf. (They also found nearly $20,000 (!) in gold coins which the General carried with him at all times to accommodate his unquenchable thirst for gambling, and his far reaching debts…)

The captured leg was then humiliated as the Illinois troops used it as a bat in what is considered the first baseball game ever played in ‘Mexico’. Captain Carmichael served as the ‘thrower’ in that game, giving up 3 scores in 10 rounds. The leg was then taken back to Illinois where it was restored and put on display in the State Military Museum at Springfield. For many years afterwards, the Colonel would wonder just what sort of fear could cause a man to exit breakfast without his leg, but a satisfactory answer never came to mind.

Butternuts!

(The Colonel was also fond of embellishing the remainder of the Santa Anna adventures. After dinner, when the brandy and cigars were making the rounds, it became clear that his entire worldview sprang from a well of military daring-do…

Apparently, General Santa Anna had the manzanita leg replaced with a more modest version fashioned from the local Cotton Wood trees, and decorated with silver and turquoise. However, his luck with the new leg was hardly any better. It too was captured, and also humiliated. The troops of Colonel Richard Oglesby, a future Governor of Illinois and good friend of Walton Carmichael, got their mitts on it in the aftermath of The Battle of Veracruz, one of the General’s last defeats. For years afterwards, Texas troops used it in races on the Rio San Antonio, practically in the shade of the Alamo. These 1/20th scale model boat races attracted a fair amount of wagering from both the professional and casual gamblers of the day. Santa Anna’s second leg—‘La Pierna Anna II’—faired badly in these contests due to its non-navigational design. It rarely beat the long odds given to it by the river boat gamblers of the area. Regardless, it was a popular sight and always inspired a bit of prideful merriment whenever it was entered in competition… Children and grown men alike would shout, "Remember the Alamo!" whenever the race got too close for La Pierna, which was not often.

As time passed and Santa Anna’s true nature became known to history, the Cottonwood leg faded from popularity. It eventually became waterlogged and sank, where disinterest left it to rot in 1857. It was eventually resuscitated in 1861, and repatriated to the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City. But by then there were far more pressing military matters, and no one gave it any further thought…)

Yes, 1861 and war on the horizon. The Colonel could smell it. And when it came, Walton made it awkwardly clear that poor Norris had only one hope of marrying his daughter, Corrine. Yes, the only road to the wedding chapel ran straight through the heart of the Grand Army of the Republic. It was a requirement and not a request, a sort of reverse dowry. This left civilian Norris in a very difficult spot, for theirs was a true love by both parties—not some arranged affair, and he felt nothing but darkness when he imagined a future without her… Marvin Norris had known Corrine for most of his life, and had been absurdly lovesick about it the entire time. But soldiering? Surely there was another way for this heart stricken lad so bereft of luck! Surely… He thought long and deep about their future together, but no solution presented itself that did not pass right through the Colonel and his damnable army. And of course, military adventures…

Oh Corrine!

Their eyes first exchanged glances at the Buckleville Baptist Church, where as an orphan he worked as a janitor for the parish. Tragedy followed Norris from his earliest days, and considering the rampant superstition of the times it was remarkable that he was ever allowed to grow close to anyone… His father, Clarence, had been an engineer on the Cleveland-Akron line, while Corrine’s father was advancing his career by redefining the border of America and Mexico. But then one summer afternoon in 1847, an explosion still talked about years later wiped the Norris family clear off the map of Ohio. Marvin’s younger sister, Daniella, was walking with his mother and eagerly anticipating the egg salad sandwiches and pickles she’d prepared for lunch. Together they strolled hand in hand, singing a local nursery tune, ‘Where the Willow Meets the Wind’, as Clarence waved to them from his locomotive cabin, distracted. In that happy moment a catastrophic noise evacuated them and many bystanders from this earth, and left Marvin at the tender age of six alone in the world. Some locals still referred to it as the Clarence Norris Boom, thinking themselves witty, even though the event had made an orphan of Marvin. The exact cause of the explosion was never linked to anyone with the Cleveland-Akron line, but a shipment of dynamite bound for mining operations in Kentucky called the tune that tragic day.

The only known Norris relatives were scattered about the villages of southern Indiana, and none of them knew how to read, and so didn’t learn of the train disaster for nearly five years. By then, Marvin was fully integrated into the Saint Liberty Orphanage of Buckleville, were he was housed and fed in exchange for a life of menial labor. If Father Creamer hadn’t taken an interest in him, he would have eventually ended up sharecropping with his feral relatives. As it was, he took very strongly to reading and cyphering, and walked about with a near college level education. He was well known at the Buckleville Library, his home away from home.

And time advanced smoothly, despite the jagged edges of drama that appear to define it.

Corrine Beatrice Carmichael blossomed most steadily: from a skinny little girl with pig tails, to a full flowered young woman with shoulder length auburn hair worn in fine curls, curls pretty enough to frame an illuminated registry of the town’s finest citizens. And the orphan Norris grew from awkward teenage boy to a solid young man with many days of shaving ahead of him. Corrine’s green eyes of childhood remained as she filled out into youthful maturity, beauty mingling with her every move. Unfortunately the many layered clothing of the day left much of her physicality a mystery to Norris (and everyone else), but a boy could dream, a boy could use his imagination!

And it was in the Buckleville Baptist Church, after a sermon on the physical and spiritual value of ‘purity’ that Marvin and Corrine met. Ironically that sermon’s theme was at odds with the potent fecundity of late April—when the loins of every mammal, and the buds of every plant, were surging forth in search of their evolutionary destiny. As the preacher blathered on monotonously about chastity, Marvin’s hand accidentally touched Corrine’s as he collected the tithing plates—and that one touch was all that was required. Corrine quietly sighed, impassive to those about her. But this moment was not lost on the Colonel’s rapt attention. Part of him knew even more certainly than either of the ‘love creatures’ that the die had just been cast, the arrow shot and the target hit, the seed planted and springing forth. And immediately he set about in his mind all of the many ways he could derail this unholy, natural moment. Military service was at the top of his list. That alone could solve many problems from many spheres, and he wouldn’t be the first to employ its awesome power. And so for Marvin Wilkie Norris and Corrine Beatrice Carmichael, the options for their futures narrowed as their new love blossomed.

As well as a future of wedded bliss with Corrine, Norris tried hard to imagine the existence of a soldier. He tried to summon a portrait of adventure and excitement, but nothing ever came to life. He had dodged the whole affair as best as possible from the first shouting headlines of Ft. Sumter in 1861, to the ‘set backs’ of Bull Run and Antietam. He had hoped the whole damn thing would be over with in a few weeks as many frequently predicted. He also avoided it for as long as legally possible, but the damn war just continued to eat people up from both sides. Eventually he found himself compelled to participate by law—and by custom, if he were ever to consummate the love he felt for Corrine, and she for him. And so in November 1862, private citizen Marvin Wilkie Norris was transformed into Private Norris, military property.

After a short eternity on the well worn parade grounds of Berlin, Ohio, with a couple thousand other unfortunate lads—weeks spent learning how to march, which was apparently the most crucial part of soldiering—and a few short days learning the use of a nine pound Springfield rifle, Norris was at the end of his training. A three week Christmas furlough was allowed, and during that time he spent his last precious moments with Corrine.

For although she would never see even the furthest edge of a battlefield, she would be victorious over Norris in that inevitable race into the dirt—beating him handily, in fact. But none of this was known then, and they spent the better part of Christmas 1862, in the parlor of her father’s house gazing into each other’s eyes by the light of a well stoked fireplace. Love seasoned by lust was in the hot air of that book lined room and it took them to dizzying heights that they would never know again. The war and all of its horror would simply have to wait!

Oh Marv, father has assured me that the experience of battle is most formative, that when you return you’ll be transformed—never to be the same again! Marvin gazed beyond her to the shadows playing hide and seek on the library and paintings, flitting as quickly as ghosts. It’s the return I’m focused on, noted Marvin. I simply can’t imagine why this confounded, treacherous war continues to drag on the way it has. What can they possibly be thinking? Oh they aren’t, she whimpered. Those beasts and their slaves simply want to drag us down, down into a state of lawlessness lower than the Indian! She hated the idea of the war, but mostly its inconvenience. He shook his head. "War or no war, it’s this—this promise, he took her hand, small with delicate fingers and a palm that was moist, this is what will move me forward! When the battle gets hot, it is the return to your world that will keep me from destruction and guide my way home."

She started to speak, but tears interrupted. Suddenly her many layers of clothing felt far too tight on her. She longed for them to be ripped asunder and tossed about the room. She longed to ride young Norris like a hard charging stallion into battle. A yearning moistness enveloped her. She bent to kiss him, her lips reflecting the flames from the crackling, raging logs of maple … but the Colonel’s throat clearing broke the mood.

Carmichael was standing at the far end of the library, leaning against a carved walnut podium which held the family dictionary. A veritable repository of American history, the stand was a gift in 1783 from Altoona Versailles, a cousin of Benjamin Franklin. It was a family heirloom that was certain to be Corrine’s one day. The dictionary, a Webster’s 1st Edition, was a graduation present to the Colonel when he finished 13th in a class of 212 at West Point in 1830. It was inscribed in Latin, Animus Vincit! (Courage Wins The Day) and was the gift of none other than Davy Crockett. Davy had been the graduation speaker that year, chosen for his nascent fame in the pioneer realm of ‘Trail Makers’ and ‘Indian Fighters’.

Directly after presenting the Colonel’s class with their dictionaries, Crockett headed west on his long but ill fated journey that terminated at the Alamo—where courage took an awful pounding. The Colonel even retained a few blood stained strands of the Crockett coonskin cap pressed into a blue velvet strip which he used as a bookmark. Whimsy and memory of the glory days enveloped him every time he leaned into the walnut podium, vines of ivy carved into its sides. And although the lovers across the library were sitting in the dimmest acceptable light, the delicate lines and edges of the stand were still visible. Accented by gold leaf, the entire piece defined higher learning and moral thrust. It simply radiated worldliness, and in the Carmichael household it was the Peak of the Last Word.

Norris fought back his own disappointment of interrupted love, arranged himself accordingly, and bid Corrine farewell. He held the tiny limp flower of her right hand and proclaimed, "We shall meet again on the other side of the inferno of war—tested not only in life, but in love as well! Adieu." He kissed her knuckles, turned on his heel and departed. Corrine’s breath caught as she choked back tears, tears that came regardless. She gathered herself in a fury and stormed from the study. She had been denied a final kiss from her lover, and the Colonel would not be forgiven for it in the foreseeable future. It’s safe to say that he would never be forgiven, but that’s simply because she would run out of time.

Victoriam per illam!

After these abrupt, emotionally strained departures, the Colonel returned his gaze to the dictionary where he was mildly surprised at the number of definitions for the word ‘duty’. He regretted not spending the time to explain them all to the Norris lad before sending him off to war. Skunk oil! The boy would figure it out soon enough, he reckoned, and on that point the Colonel was right.

Change 2008—A House Redivided

I changed once, and I ain’t ever doing it again.

—Red, of Red’s Tavern

In November of 2008, a political miracle still not fully understood occurred: war hero John McCain and his lunatic running mate, Sarah Palin lost the presidency to Barack Hussein Obama. They lost to ‘the Muslim’, and it wasn’t even close. The Republican elephant was on fire! By the end of Election Day, John McCain was so flustered and whipped that he refused to give up the podium during his concession speech. To his right the true believer’s candidate, Sarah Palin, was loosening up—ready to go hog wild. His disdain for her, which had been showing through the cracks near the end of the campaign, was now in full view—and this did not play well with the party’s bitter, angry base.

Sarah waited, panting the wings to wind the crowd up from their moribund misery with her homespun vitriol about evil government, states rights, Jesus in schools, and union workers who have fucking ruined the economy—and all of that American oil languishing underneath every patriot’s EPA protected front yard, and every Jew’s oceanfront mansion. Fuck—she was ready to blow! She didn’t need any TelePrompTer—her message was going to come from the gut, and it was spewin’ time! But Johnny McCain had never really gotten along with her, and now it was time to kick that wacko slut to the curb. He waved her away as his speech of defeat wound down. The boos echoed loudly that vile evening—and their horrible din can still be heard when the evil desert wind whips through the lesser, hard bitten neighborhoods of Phoenix, and the billowing sands turn the night sky a terrible cirrhosis yellow.

Never generous in defeat, the Right Wing of American politics vowed then and there to dis-abide the results of this national democratic election. Instead of another old white Christian in 2008, America elected a President whose ancestral roots surely went back to slavery, or at the least to the slave trade in Africa. All of which would have been church burning, strange fruit, lynch party inconceivable in 1863. And although it represented a new chapter in our society, things did not go smoothly. How could they? The previous administration had just left the country with a thoroughly broken economy; two unfinished wars/occupations; and a national health care crisis that was breaking and bankrupting people from all walks of life. Regardless, the symbolism of a slave descendent rising to President of the United States surely meant, if nothing else, that the American Civil War was finally laid to rest. God saw this and said it was good, and so it was good.

Right?

But that was November, 2008… And I suppose the blowback against a black president was to be expected, although I tended to embrace the mood of the seemingly endless cheering, multi-colored, supportive mobs at the Obama inauguration. Instead, a Right Wing vehemence of astonishing tone began broadcasting coast to coast before all the ballots were even counted. After the death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the flames of incendiary language and cynical political persuasion were fanned without question, fact checking, or any other restraint. Boy howdy—The Fairness Doctrine? It was once required that highly opinionated broadcasters offer a counterpoint to their partisan diatribes whenever using the Public Airwaves. It was the law for awhile, and is a concept that still gives The Right Wing night terrors whenever it is mentioned near closing time—when the hi-ball glasses are slippery, and the Scotch ice merely water. The powers that roll the Right Wing machine of America would rather see this nation burned to the ground than return to the days of the Fairness Doctrine. And more than once they’ve fumbled for their lighters in just such an attempt to do so…

Still, there was almost a brief moment of national pause in February, 2009, when the head A.M. radio spokesperson for the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, declared to his vast audience that he "hoped the President would fail." And his desire for presidential failure would have been an opinion worthy of a talk show if he were raising the prospects of a particular piece of legislation. But Limbaugh’s unprecedented attack occurred before the inaugural parade had even made it halfway down Pennsylvania Avenue… And so the echoes of Fort Sumter outside of Charleston, thought to be long since stilled, began rumbling again.

Once upon a time, openly wishing for the failure of a new President in the face of two wars and total economic collapse might have even been considered treason; however, in 2009, it was merely business as usual for wealthy old white men when they inexplicably lost the White House. Goddamned voting bullshit! Goddamned Fairness Doctrine! Unfortunately, patriotic hate speech sells far better than liberal blather mouths wanting to talk about all issues from all points of view. Forget about selling radio ads for that crap. Just get out the bullhorn, an American flag, a gun and a bible, and start hollering about the end of the world. That’s what sells radio ads.

Hopefully it sells novels too!

It was stunning. So much of the country was in turmoil. Economic uncertainty roamed the land, club in hand, cracking heads at all levels of society. Entire neighborhoods of homes were being repossessed and devoured. Millions were thrown out of work. Desperation was the mood of the day, and yet there was Rush manning the radio waves from coast to coast actively wishing for Presidential failure, and by proxy, failure for the nation in times of unparalleled modern collapse. And although Rush was just one very loud voice, his proclamations set the tone for the unanimous Right Wing Republicans for the rest of the Obama presidency. Amplifying his hopes for an Obama failure were a small army of devoted imitators whose radio shows followed one after another from sun up to sundown. Soon, in the minds of many Americans, their new president had become some sort of Muslim monster bent on destroying their freedoms, and the greatest nation on earth—all from the confines of the White House! Such is the power of relentless propaganda…

There would be no Republican cooperation, no compromise on any issue regardless of the necessity for action. This was followed by attacks at every conceivable level with the political intention of bringing such pain to the entire nation that they would never again vote for anyone like an Obama. The Right knew the people of America had made a really big fucking mistake, and they were determined to teach them a lesson they would not soon forget… Every single would-be Congressperson on the Republican ticket received this ‘horse head in the bed’ message. And they followed it without question because opposition meant a thorough ravaging in the primaries by exceptionally well funded opponents who knew the party line, and kept their toes firmly upon it. Just say Hell, no! to all things Obama became the Right Wing pledge of allegiance. And pledge it they did…

A visitor from another country listening to AM talk radio in 2009 would have to assume that the record setting crowds of adoring fans at the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama were all paid extras on some elaborate movie set, as it was clear from the radio and internet that America hated its new president. Right Wing commentators cleared this up by revealing that the vast majority of that crowd were receiving Welfare and Food Stamp benefits, programs renown for their insane generosity, and therefore these ‘fans’ had no choice but to leave their ghettoes in Chicago, New York, and New Orleans and travel to