Did Trump really cave?

Monday, January 28, 2019

After weeks of hearing Democrats and media whining about how much federal workers were being hurt by the shutdown, and how Trump ought to do the right thing and make sure these loyal government employees did not starve (even though every one of them would get full back pay once the Trump struck a deal with a Democrats), Trump decides to suspend the shutdown for 21 days to allow workers to catch up, and media goes ape shit claiming he caved in to Pelosi.

This has allowed media and Democrats to sell two lines of bullshit to the unsuspecting public.

First that Trump was outfoxed by Pelosi or that the bogus indictment of Roger Stone so scared Trump that he had to so something to get the negative headlines off the news feed.

The first is a classic example of the double bind as outlined by 1960s psychologist, Lang – or in more conventional terminology: you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

Lang used the example of a mentally unfit mother rather than a mentally ill media, who gives her son two shirts, a blue one and a green one, and when her son comes to breakfast wearing the green shirt, she asks, “What? You don’t like the blue shirt?”

Media is going to spin the worst no matter what Trump does. Had he kept up the shutdown, we would have heard more bitching and moaning about how government workers are suffering and how Trump is to blame (even though Pelosi and the Democrats share the same level of guilty) and how workers will starve unless Trump gives up his plans to force the Democrats into building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

But when Trump finally feels sorry for the impact the conflict is having on the workers (which clearly Democrats did not and were willing to let suffer as long as they could make their political points), media and Democrats howl about how he caved in, and how tough Pelosi was, and how weak Trump must be.

The fact is federal workers were always going to get their back pay, and for all of the wailing by media-manipulating Democrats, the shutdown largely amounted to forced savings.

The Roger Stone indictment is even more ludicrious, just one more pathetic attempt by the Mueller investigation to show it is still relevant when clearly after two years of hearing fake Russian conspirciy theories only the most deluded liberals actually believe it. N

Mueller needed to keep his investigation in the headlines, and to add to the notches on his gun belt for all the so called bad guys he brought down, even if he has used every unethical and questionable method to charge them, sometimes so pathetically desperate you have to wonder how Mueller can look in the mirror each morning and not laugh at himself.

Mueller is the Beetle Baily of federal investigators, just competent enough to do the wishes of the Democrats, but not quite enough to actually find a real conspiracy, so he has to manufacture one out of bits and pieces of things such as charges of lying to the FBI and other things that really don’t add up to anything except in the deluded minds of Democrats desperate to overturn the 2016 election and media that will distort anything to sell its anti-Trump agenda.

Media harps on the nearly dozen indictments Mueller has brought against those close to Trump, ignoring the more than 40 scandals that occurred with White House and the federal legislature under Obama, and a score more under Bush before him, with a record number of Reagan indictments of 138 before that.

This really is trying to build a mountain out of a pile of horseshit.

Many Democrats are still peeved at Stone for his uncovering the fact that liberal Democratic New York Governor Spitzer routinely hired prostitutes.

This, too, is a kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation.

Democrats are big on the Me-Too movement, yet try not to admit that most of the victims of these vigilantes are Democrats and that the public should not judge the Democratic Party by the miscreant acts of people like Spitzer or Bill Clinton, yet at the same time try to make a case against Trump for his alleged affair with a porn star well before he was elected president.

Nobody is supposed to notice the Democratic double standard or the fact that they will do or say anything to regain political power.

Native Americans: take them or leave them

January 24, 2019

Few things better reflect the extreme views of Native Americans than those of Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper – two of Americans foremost writers.

Twain had little good to say about Indians, even though he considered himself “a disciple of Cooper, and a worshiper of the Red Man,” as well as a scholar in regards to the “savages” in the “Last of the Mohicans.”

Twain, who had believed Cooper’s version of Indian life, was shocked at what he later witnessed.

“I saw that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of Romance,” Twain wrote. “The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the pain and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filth and repulsive.”

Twain found Cooper and his school out of touch with reality, trying to create language of hungers and mountaineers the way a Broadway clerk might have eating a book on frontier life at the Broadway Theater over a couple of weeks.

Twain’s description of some Indian tribes would give the politically correct reader of today a stroke who could call him a racist. Unfortunately, these readers would prefer Cooper who was something of an Indian groupie the way Elizabeth Warren and the generation of post 1960s kids are today, a collection of people who have returned to Cooper’s deluded conception of the “Noble Savage,” although these kids come at it with a racist anti-white twist.

Twain’s descriptions of particular tribes were extremely harsh especially when it came to certain tribes such as the Goshoot Indians who he said were “very considerable inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California,” and even less than the Tgerra Del Fuegans, the Hottentots, and “actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa.”

Twain said he had to go through the bulky volumes of Rev. J. G. Wood’s books on uncivilized men “in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots” and came up with only the Bushmen of South Africa.”

But in his journey west, Twain said he saw Goshoots along the road, hanging around stations, and described them as small and scrawny, with dirty hands, “a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race, taking note of everything, covertly, like all other ‘Nobel Red Men’ that we do not read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, ever-lasting patient and tireless like all other Indians, pride less beggars…always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline…who when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to.”

While this was his description of a particular tribe, Twain went on to day “Wherever one finds an Indian tribe, he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings,” and fundamentally, all the tribes he encounters were only variations on Goshoots.

Twain write what he saw firsthand, a clearly degraded people before and after the American Civil War, at a time when a once noble and powerful people had long fallen into decline, aided partly by alcohol and loss of traditional territories in the East. Twain described some tribes as a race of beggars and worse, who seemed to have no purpose and largely existed on the charity of society -- not at all fitting the Cooperesque documentaries of the Burn brothers who painted them with the same tinted and nostalgic hue as Cooper and his followers did.

Cooper wrote his novels many decades after the events he attempts to portray. He did not describe what he saw, but what he imagined took place, and because there was so little actual history written about Indians at that time and its culture, many have come to accept his version as fact when it was in reality fiction.

In some ways we are in worse shape today than Cooper’s time, separated from actual facts by centuries, and so are forced to rely on Indian-self portraits or worse liberal reinvention of history – like that of the Burns’ brothers to tell us what Native Americans were really like and what actually happened to explain how Cooper’s “beautiful people” declined into the beggars Twain saw huddled along the road sides of the west, looking for handouts, and worse, drink.

Unfortunately, most people today lean towards what Cooper imagined rather than what Twain actually saw.

But Twain was hardly as judgmental as the liberals might make him out to be. He understood that he was not seeing Native American at their best.

“They deserve pity, poor creatures, and they can have mine – at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s,” Twain wrote, going on to say, “if we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name, let us at lease not throw mud at them.”

History since Twain’s time has shifted back towards the concept of the noble savage. But there have been true moments of nobility and struggle, such as at Wounded Knee,” and true political heroes who have stepped up and taken the side of a once degraded people to help them once again regain historic dignity – heroes liberals would not acknowledge such as Richard Nixon – who gave back massive tracks of lands, and true villains such as Ronald Reagan, who completely ignored the plight of Native Americans with his “hands off” policies.

But today, Native American have become a political tool for a race-baiting conflict between liberals and conservatives, with liberals seeking make the conflict about people of color against a white establishment.

It’s very sad, and pathetic, as if we are living in the middle of one of Cooper’s novels, where all Red Men are good, and all White men bad (somewhat of an exaggeration of Cooper, but not of today’s politics.”

Should Native Americans apologize to white settlers?

Jan. 21, 2019

Maybe I missed it.
But I’m still waiting for an apology from Native Americans for the murder innocent settlers, the rape of their women and the abduction of their children.

It’s only fair.

We hear a lot of revisionists tell us how bad Columbus was, as they tear down his statue.

Many of the same people who celebrate Sherman and Sheridan for how well they butchered the south during the American Civil War, suddenly find the same behavior appalling when inflicted on Native Americans.

These liberal revisionists hardly mention the innocent settlers murdered, scalped, raped or abducted except to justify such atrocities by claiming white men did these things first.

Many of these accusing liberal fingers point to Columbus as the guilty party, the guy who started it all, the one should get lynched his misdeeds.

It’s for this reason the fighting Irish of Notre Dame turned into whimpering wimps and removed references to Columbus – even covering over a mural that depicted him on their campus.

Perhaps this was done out of guilt for the role we Irish played in protecting innocent settlers from murder, rape, scaping a few centuries after Columbus.

For the most part we are seeing white liberals feeling guilt for actions designed to protect innocent people from harm in what became an escalating series of atrocities committed by both sides.

Radical African Americans groups appear to be seeking any way possible to cast blame on whites no matter what century.

Some of what liberal and black groups say may even be accurate in a narrow interpretation of history.

A significant amount of what liberals believe is myth (or deliberate lies) built on the back on some atrocities while ignoring others.

The left tends to do this with everything from slavery and the civil war to urban crime, making heroes out of morally challenged characters by using misinformation as fact.

This is not to exonerate Columbus, who clearly ignored the humanity of the natives he encountered on his arrival, but to point out how selective liberals are when it comes to history, picking which facts to consider relevant and which facts - inconvenient to their preconceived notions -- to ignore.

Columbus was clearly a man of his time, someone whose interests were financial – just as the blacks who sold blacks to northern slave traders to be sold in the South centuries later – were.

But Columbus was no mass-murderer.

Native Americans perished due largely to their lack of resistance to diseases carried from Europe to the Americas (much as the Marians in Well’s War of the Worlds). Well over 65 percent of Native Americans perished due to disease.

Not only did this decimate whole tribes but brought down what some consider very viable Native American cultures, many of which were forced back into a survival mode and to some degree violence against themselves and against the white Europeans with whom they were forced to compete for rare resources.

Liberals like to say white settles stole land from Native Americans. This may have been true later in history – especially when it came to lands containing gold. But it was not true early on.

Native Americans did not understand property ownership and assumed whites were crazy thinking they could own land or sky.

This is where the term Indian giver derived.

Since native Americans did not believe anyone could own land or sky, simply took it back   needless to say this led to numerous conflicts. 

Columbus did not inspire this clash of culture. He was caught in the middle of it -- something liberal revisionists refuse to understand so caught up in their own inflated sense of self-righteousness.  They judge him and that time based on their own skewed world view in which Indians are victims of white aggression -- something only partially true.

Whites for a good part fled European oppression and unfortunate carried some oppression with them. 

Survival bread a kind of viciousness that is not acceptable in a civilized society. But liberals who live in the protected little cocoons here in modern times far from any need for survival instincts -- do not understand that because they don't have to survive in the same way.

As in all cultural clashes both whites and Indians fought for necessities and the fact that bloodshed leads to more bloodshed, these conflicts escalated it to a kind of hatred on both sides.

While liberal groups try to paint white Europeans as racists, the truth is that Indians hated whites such as much as whites hated Indians, and both sides had justification for this hatred. Atrocities on both sides lead to more atrocities until both sides he hated each other so much that slaughter was inevitable.  

And since Europeans brought advanced technology that Native American lacked, the handwriting was on the wall long before whites moved west.

Unfortunately, Europe racked with wars brought those conflicts to these shores and Indians had to pick sides.

This was particularly true in the misnamed “French and Indian War.”

Tribes with the British and the French, in a war that largely decided western expansion.

While Native Americans might have won temporary reprieve had the French been victorious, you must remember the French in Haiti were responsible for the worst atrocities of the slave trade. Some historians believe that Native Americans became targets because they resisted becoming slaves – The French could not tear apart families and tribes in America as they did with the blacks in Haiti.

The war was over land management. The French wanted open land for fur and other trade. The British wanted settlements.

the British victory eventually allowed settlers to expand into the Ohio valley marking the start of western expansion, and an increase in conflict and savagery, as Native Americans – squeezed out of traditional territories began a campaign of murder, rape and abductions against settlers.

People like Daniel Boone – who like Columbus – has become an enemy of contemporary liberals – helped protect settlers.

But the war and continued new settlements in the east inevitably drove Indian tribes farther west. Many of the tribes we associate with the west originated along the east coast. 

Expansion west exasperated the violence not just between whites and Indians but Indians with Indians who displaced other tribes.

Indian on Indian violence was nothing new. Tribes wage war on each other long before Columbus. But pressure by increasing white populations made the situation worse as tribes and whites engaged in an ever-escalating competition for a shrinking territory. Despite the wealth of the West there was little resources enough for all of these groups -- whites, Indians and even the Mexicans -- who were being pushed around in and out of California.

Liberals like to recreate history of the unpopular war with Mexico that eventually led to Texas becoming a state, turning the tyranny of people like Santa Ana into some heroic ethnic effort against whites – while turning people like Sam Houston and Davey Crockett into exploiters, rather than people dedicated to protecting settlers and settlements. This also figures into the north-south conflict and the eventual American Civil War.

The north’s victory led to an even more serious move of settlers west, freed slaves, former southern seeking to escape the tyranny of reconstruction, but most of all, northern families seeking to take advantage of earlier expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase and the equally controversial explorations of Lewis and Clark.

These spelled the doom of Indian way of life – although in truth these were the concluding chapters in a doomed spelled out from the end of the French and Indian Wars.

Settlers saw Indians for the most part as savages, partly because of the increasing atrocities. Unfortunately, America today has returned to the misconception of the noble savage and American Indians have been made to look like victims of genocide. This misses the point entirely. Hated of Indians was based less on overt prejudice than terror.

In retribution for evil gold diggers and an over aggressive military, Indians struck back at settlers, who demanded protection.

The gold rush was indeed a horrible exploitation of Indian, Mexicans and Chinese but the war against the Indians after the civil war was not over gold but to protect settlers who had begun moving west.

Sheridan saw the conflict with the Indians in the same light as the war with the south and so applied the same tactics.

Northern soldiers raped and pillaged the south as part of a campaign to break the southern spirit and bring to conclusion the war between the states.

Sheridan saw no reason not to apply the same tactics in the west and even order the destruction of buffalo in hopes to starve the Indians into submission.

The irony in all this is that liberals brainwashed on misinformation about slavery in the South will forever make these bastards – Sherman, Grant and Sheridan -- into heroes for brutalizing the Confederacy and then equally brainwashed by misinformation about American Indian painted these three scoundrels as the vanguard of white genocide against Indians.

Liberals are perfectly willing to forgive American Indians for murder, scalping, rape and kidnapping and yet are unwilling to forgive Columbus who did much less.

Columbus has become a scapegoat partly out of his ignorance and arrogance that liberals find Unforgivable well still tolerating mass Slaughter by American Indians who they revere.

Liberals also ignore the fact that it was not Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, LBJ or Obama that gave the most land back to Native Americans – but President Richard Nixon. And you can see just how much respect these liberals have for Nixon.

As I pointed out earlier, I'm still waiting for an apology as one of the descendants of settlers who were murdered, raped, scalped or kidnapped.

But I won't hold my breath cuz I know it will never come.

Buzzfeed’s lie was not an exception

How many MSNBC reporters does it take to change a light bulb?

One, provided he or she has a very gullible, corrupt, deaf, dumb or blind editor, a number of unnamed sources, and the rest of the media establishment to testify that the reporter is unbiased.

Buzzfeed’s open lying this week only showed the inner working of mainstream media – in which all of them lie or distort information, only with media such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, they rarely get caught at it.

A close friend of mine has the unfortunate privilege of sitting in on MSNBC editorial meetings where it is a daily routine of reporters and editors to seek out new stories that will humiliate, embarrass or show Trump in a bad light. If they can’t come up with a legitimate story, they twist facts of what would be an ordinary story to get the result they want – avoiding the one mortal sin of doing anything to show Trump in any kind of positive light.

While I have no friends in The Washington Post (nor would I want any), I imaging the scene is largely the same. This is not the fault of either organizations or the host of Washington Post wannabes from coast to coast, it is the nature of the news biz.

Our job is not to report facts, but to reshape them into myth.

News is a business and the product we sell is not mouthwash or any of the ads that appear on the news feed, the product is news – and we shape this to fit our perceived audience, and those perceived prejudices, and since contemporary liberalism is largely being anti-white-male, anti-god, anti-old people, anti-Jewish and pro all those things we used to take for granted as dangerous – such as the massive release of prisoners, promotion of questionable radical organizations with ties to terrorism, and a new movement mistakenly called feminism but it largely thinly disguised man-hate, these are the kinds of stories we get in our newsfeed from lying and distorted media such as Buzzfeed  as well as the so called more legitimate media.

The concept of black and white used to mean clear distinction between fact and fiction, such as the old cliché “there is it in black and white,” but black and white has since taken on racial overtones as new radical historic revisionism seeks to smear the lines between truth and non-truth, and create myths in order to keep true liberal believers happy – much the way the old church used to make up parables which may or may not have some semblance of truth or fact, but like political prisoners if tortured enough will say exactly what media wants them to say and what the audience wants to hear, becoming symbolic of some larger issue which may or may not actually have validity.

Myth is hard to undo once it has been injected into the public consciousness. For instance, there are still people who believe Ford’s clearly disprove claims against Kavanaugh (largely because that’s what they want to believe and would believe it regardless of actual evidence to the contrary.) The whole Russian conspiracy is so drenched in the traditions of former Red Scares and so desperately needed by liberals to justify why Clinton lost that media continues to spread misinformation and distortion as proof and those sad liberals who cannot bear the idea that other people have other opinions and can express them through the ballot box.

This fantasy of Russian influencing the election is perhaps the greatest myth making of our time partly because all governments interfere with other nations’ elections – a tradition that goes back to the founding fathers when such claims were made against Great Britain almost through every election from George Washington to Abe Lincoln.  But as Gore once pointed out in a different context, the Russian conspiracy is a convenient truth that allows media to create a mountain of myth out of a mole hill of bullshit – if not so obviously a lie as Buzzfeed’s was.

email to Al Sullivan

Weird (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

Dave loves the sound of his own voice; I hate the sound of mine.

That doesn't stop us from recording me, of course, and playing back for giggles.

Dave records everything and makes us guess what it is: crickets, cat purrs, a dog bark, even a burp

He even records songs he likes off the radio with a tinny microphone that makes them sound strange.

He records secret things he refuses to play to us, talking to the tape recorder the way I used to talk to the priest when I attended Catholic School,

It bugs the hell out of me that he won't tell me -- his best friend -- what he says or even his little brother Dennis, who’ll blab about anything if I threaten to beat him up.

Neither of us can imagine what a secret Dave’s age could possibly have that he needs to keep them to himself.

This only makes me, and Dennis think, he's talking about us. 

Dennis tells me he plans to steal the tape recorder some night when Dave is sleeping only Dave keeps it somewhere Dennis can't find.

Sometimes Dave asks us to record stuff for him not silly stuff though.

He asks me to talk about how we feel about things, not about school, he doesn’t want to hear about that, he wants to know what we feel when we get wet in the rain, or what we see when we look at clouds, stuff like that.

I tell him he's crazy and ask him why he needs to know things like that.

He doesn't answer; he just gets moody like he does when he's been up all night and can't reach any of the truckers on his CB radio.

I don't even know what he says to them when he does reach them

I don't know what he does with the tapes he records though I saw he had a cigar box once, he refuses to let me open.

The tapes don’t record much; they are just three in reels that flap loose when they're done. Then he takes the old one off and then threads another one on.

Dave’s good at things like that, threading tape or wire, putting things together or even taking them apart.

Sometimes when we're in the hall recording something stupid, he hears his mother and father fighting; then he flicks off the recorder carries it over to the door sticks the microphone near the gap then turns the recorder on again.

He never plays those back either; he just takes it off the recorder when he's done and puts another tape on for us to record on.

Louie the rich kid that lives two doors down from my house up the hill has another kind of tape recorder. He doesn't need to thread. You stick a cassette into the recorder and it does everything by itself and records more than the 7- and 1/2-minutes Dave's tape records.

I tell Dave I'm going to buy a recorder just like the one Louie has; Dave even comes with me to the radio store on Lakeview Avenue, across the street from Doctor Wallace's office, where he saw one in the window. It costs a lot a lot more than the reel to reel Dave bought in one of the cheap shops on Main Street downtown and even that was a lot.

Dave says maybe I should buy one like he has; but I don't want to. So, I put my money down on the lay away plan the way my mother used to do so she could buy things we needed when she and I live alone on Carroll Street and later in the Christopher Columbus projects.

I am not a patient person I hate waiting for anything. 

So, I brood over it, thinking the money I put away to buy the recorder is lost, and I have to try and figure out how to get more so I don't have to wait.

I don't even know what I wanted for.

I already got a pocket radio to listen to music on, and the fights my uncle's fight in my house aren’t things I ever want to hear again, and I don’t know of any deep secrets I need to record in the dead of night like Dave does.

I want it because I want it and I want it right away.

So, when Dave starts to record stuff again, I get annoyed.

I can't be funny for him; I refuse to tell him how I feel when it rains.

Dennis doesn't understand why I am grumpy. Neither does Dave. Maybe I don't even know why I just am.

And there's so much I want to know -- why Dave needs to record everything he hears; why he asked such strange questions; what he records when we're not there.

I know I will never know.

Though Dennis does tell me later, he found Dave's stash.

“Did you get to hear any of the tapes?” I asked when Dave's not around.

“No,” he tells me.

“Why not?” I ask.

“It's weird,” he says.

“What’s weird?”

“What he does with the tapes.”

“He puts them in that box of his,” I say.

“Yeah, he does that but later he burns them.”

“Burns them?”

“That's right,” Dennis says. “That box is filled with melted tape. It's weird.”

A penny for your thoughts (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

Dave wears the same suit as I wear when neither of us ever wears suits.

I used to wear ties in Catholic grammar school, feeling as if a noose hung around my neck, which makes everybody wonder why we wear suits now that we are in Junior High School when nobody has to, which is why we do it, because we can, and must, drawing stares, not merely because we look the way we do, or sound like we do in the echoes of these marble halls, where my mother and uncles walked and talked, not even because we are who we are and people always stare to see what we will do next, but because this time we’re doing something nobody ever expected, and because we look like we shouldn’t look, and act the way teachers, administration, truant officers and police want us to act, at least, on the surface and everybody sees that and laugh and never stop staring.

I don’t even know whose idea this is, Dave’s or mine, only that we both have ties and suit jackets back home some family member gave us in the hope we might accomplish something significant enough to deserve to wear them, knowing we won’t, and he or I or both, decide not to let the garments go to waste, to wear them at school, pretending to deserve wearing them, when everybody from the cafeteria service workers to the vice principal for our class knows better.

We don’t even see what the other looks like until we show up at school dressed like this. Drt5ave laughs at me; I laugh at him; we plunge through the front doors and into the student population, passing security guard and a teacher, neither of whom recognize us at first, and then don’t believe what they are seeing when they do, then ask what we are up to; we don’t tell them, we just march on, going up the down staircase the way we usually do, to classrooms we are supposed to go to, getting the same strange looks on the second floor as we get on the first, the hall monitor – a teacher – ordering us to the office – so she can figure out what it is we’re up to and stop us before it gets out of hand.

The principal has a person vendetta against me. And maybe I deserve it. I’m always testing the limits of her patience, and she always fails. She gets that look in her eyes every time she sees me, and seems to take pleasure in taking me to task.

Of course, my cutting class gives her excuse, but she’s more riled by the fact that she doesn’t always know when I’m doing it, until long after she can do anything about it, since the best way to cut a class is to not show up for the first period and so you’re marked up as absent for the day. This puts you on a list that has someone calling home to find out why I’m not as school and if I’m really ill, and if my uncles know I’m not in school that day.

The principal issues suspensions like she’s invented the word, one day for cutting class, another for faking illness, and this wouldn’t be bad if I actually got to stay out of school, but she’s invented a new system called in house suspension so I get to sit in a classroom somewhere with a teacher glaring at me, often after school hours.

I have a good gig with one of the girls who works in the office making the phone calls home, a girl named Rita whose had a crush on me since the first day of school, agreeing not to call home when I cut first period, but then, she black mails me, saying that if I don’t go out with her she’ll report the whole thing to the principal, I try to pawn her off on Dave, but he’s in love with someone else, so I give up what is otherwise a nearly perfect scheme, and try to find some other way to get out of classes.

We do not go to the principal’s office; we go to Little Sue’s locker on the third floor the way we’ve been doing for a whole week, each of us dropping a penny through the air slot in the door just to annoy her, and we know it does, a ritual so fixed in our habits now, it seems like the offerings we make in church, we, not laughing at all as we perform it, stern-faced, serious, until later when she sees us in the hall and growls at us, saying we will be sorry for pestering us, and she even more annoyed because she does this in front of friends she sees as cool, and since we are so uncool, just acknowledging us taints her, and she is forced to explain to her cool friends how we all live on the same block and how our parents all know each other, even though her parents rarely talk to my uncles, and her family has never met Dave’s mother at all.

Sue’s ranting hurts Dave, and he tells me we ought to stop, hoping that if we do she might like him better when he’s the last person on earth that she will ever like, having hated his puppy affection for her when both attended School No. 11 together, and though she once had a crush one me when she was still too naïve to know better, she eventually realized I’m not the kind of boy she should hang around if she wants to get ahead in the world; I’m not a son of a doctor or lawyer, I don’t even pretend to be hip the way some of her hip friend do. For Sue, everything is about the future, and she’s latched on to the popular crowd hoping she can be popular, too.

Sue always led the chants of “Jolly Green Giant” after Dave got left back for the second time in grammar school, already too tall for his normal grade, towering over tots two years his junior, and suffering daily abuse to and from school and in the school yard for standing out like he does, and he, begging to accompany her despite the taunt, each day offering to carry her books up the hill they both had to climb from the school to Crooks Avenue where we all live.

Maybe he thinks she will see him differently, dressed up the way we are, more worthy than he was in sneakers and jeans, less lean or green, a gentle giant she can trust when all the cool kids turn out mean, each penny dropped into her locker as if into her head, to remind her that he still exists and me, going along with it all just for kicks, knowing it won’t work anyway after having lived next door to her for all these years, seeing her come and go with her pretty little nose elevated, needing to see her get peeved for something simple as a few pennies, we disguised in suits we have no business wearing, no future to justify, no vision beyond the 3 p.m. bell and our own charging out of school tearing off ties and jackets to roll again in the dust near the tracks – and yet we parade, too many months after to Halloween to use costumes as an excuse, drawing stares and curses and laughs, but not from Sue, who promises she will get even, and she does, when the hall proctors stop us to tell us the principal wants to see us in the office, where Sue stands among a flock of teachers and tells outrageous lies about how we follow her everywhere she goes, and how we broke into her locket and stole all her books, and how much she hates both of us, especially Dave, and wants us expelled, the principal glaring down at us as she always does when we do stupid things like this, telling us we’ve gone too far this time, then frowns at us when we stay silent, since we usually deny doing what we’ve done and so don’t know what to say when we are really innocent, and the outraged Sue glaring at us and the principal, saying she must do something or we won’t stop, saying we are bad kids, who ought to be punished, but saying not one word about the pennies.