Neanderpundit

I was a very small lad, and very shy. Yaw, mynheer, dot is so. I used to like to hide behind my dad’s legs, and if he was wearing his trenchcoat, sometimes I would slip inside it and stand there, making us look like a black wooly quadruped with large muscular back legs and tiny front legs, like an improbable kangaroo.

I had followed Dad onto the escalator in Sears at River oaks mall- at that time, it was an outdoor mall and Mom was shopping at SS Kresges, while dad looked at shoes for me (I seemed to need a new set every six weeks) and Dad held my hand as I stepped up and in front of him, then tucked into his coat, my secret hiding spot. it smelled like wool and VO-5 and Old Spice.

Riding up the escalator, I peeked out from between the buttons of dad’s coat to see we had gotten on just behind a young lady (Well, young to me, now, but a “grownup” to me then) who was wearing a one piece dress, of the kind that was popular in, say, 1964. They were knit, and it had gaps between the material big enough to stick your finger in. I knew the type, my aunt had one just like it, but SHE wore a slip under hers, where this woman had nothing on under hers but underwear! Shees, you could actually see part of her buttcheeks! I don’t know if I even knew what I was looking at, at the time, but I felt it was something that had to be touched…

…So I reached up my five year old finger and pointed, and before I could even get close, a spark of static electricity about 2″ long leapt from my finger and zapped the woman right in the right buttcheek. The shock startled me so I withdrew my hand back into Dad’s coat, and she turned around and slapped dad right in the face so hard his hat flew off and down to the jewelry department.

Dad, who had been looking to his left as the display of fall sporting goods went by, was completely taken unawares. We had just about reached the top so the woman in the open knit dres stormed off and dad grabbed my hand, we walked off towards Shoes.

I wonder if he ever figured out what he had been slapped for, and how he explained the loss of a hat and the huge red weal on his cheek to mom later.

I have known a few. Some good, some bad, some whose stories leave you with a longing to hear more.

I have not yet read Travels with Charley. I intend to, very soon. I have just stumbled upon Bill Steigerwald’s “Travels without Charley”. In it, Steigerwald sticks his thumb in the legend, by using his mad sleuthing skills to discover that Steinbeck’s book was “A fraud”.

Well, then.

Bill, you ignorant slut. Steinbeck was a storyteller. A blisteringly good one, lest you forget. I don’t know, and I don’t care, if Travels with Charlie is billed as a 100% true to life, but if the stories it tells are 1% as good as the other stories Steinbeck has told, the good news is his book will be selling long after everyone has forgotten who the hell Steigerwald is, the pissant.

Some of it is about the story, and some of it is about the man. Both are better than any pissant will ever be, IMO.

A similar thing happened to Colonel Richard Meinerzagen; Garfield’s book- which he titles “the Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud” is all about how the Colonel’s accounts of things often don’t jibe with the facts, and lot of other things about him.

Well, sure. meinerzhagen was the only naturalist ever to take credit for someone else’s work, or crib his results from someone elses research, it never happened anywhere else. What horseshit. I find it difficult to care, but that part of his life has been overblown to show him to be “A collosal fraud”? Really? The contemprary and schoolmate of Winston Churchill, The man about whom T E Lawrence said

Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain….

What was it that Lawrence said about Garfield? Oh, that’s right, not a goddamned thing.

Menerzhagen was a Man writ large. He may have been a prick and was almost certainly a murderor. His demonstrably true exploits were enough on their own to deserve notice. He killed people with his bare hands when he felt it necesary. He was a fearless and powerful big game hunter and has several species named after him. His hunts are well documented by others and beyond question. Did he actually do all those other things he wrote about, or claimed to have done, in times of war? Did what he recorded exist to mask some possibly even more unsavory truth? Without a time machine nobody will ever know. What I know, is that his memory, and the things he actually did, will always outshine anything some liberal shitbag like garfield will ever do. The idea that garfield’s book is an “Expose” is ludicrous. And as always, even if the Colonel’s exploits are all fabrication, they are a billion times better fabrication than garfield’s ‘Truth”. I find not one thing in Garfield to suggest we take his word over Meinerzhagens.

in ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”, Chuck Barris claims to have been a CIA hitman during the height of his bizzarre TV career and the cold war. Really? This is the movie Roger Ebert, that miserable cunt, gave three and a half stars. After all, it’s just entertainment, right?

I’ll stick with entertainment about actual men, and decent storytellers, despite the desire of the small minded to tear them down, and I will ignore the entertainment about clowns who are portrayed as heroes, by fools.