What Not To Say at a Motorcycle Rally

Well, it looked like tortoise-shell to me!

Just as you don't question the legitimacy of the "gay" lifestyle in San Francisco, you don't call a motorcycle painted like the one above "tortoise-shell." At least not at a serious motorcycle rally. Its young owner looked at me as if I were three steps beneath dirt and said that the paint job was of flames. He clearly thought I should apologize or even leave the fairgrounds altogether. Just as clearly, I shrugged, said, "Oh, flames, OK," and then walked away without further comment.

You meet interesting people at a motorcycle rally, especially if it is dedicated to America's Prisoners of War and to those who went Missing in Action. POW/MIA rallies and motorcycles seem to go together these days. The men who attend them are now getting a bit long in the tooth, although a few of them are veterans of more recent shootouts than Vietnam. Some are survivors of the "first" Gulf War (under GHW Bush) or of the two unpleasantries still in progress today in Afghanistan and Iraq. The typical Vietnam veteran does not exist. They are in all walks of life and subscribe to all types of belief systems, be they political or religious.

But the typical BIKER Vietnam veteran wears Levi's, black boots, a black leather jacket with lots of slogans and clever phrases on it (some of them actually quotable in polite company,) and skin which has either been exposed to the sun almost constantly since birth, or possibly spent several months ON the sun. It's difficult to tell. With this leather background, tattoos are also in evidence, although many of them are oozing out in various directions and becoming unclear.

The wives (Let's be generous in our assumptions, shall we?) of these gentlemen either dress just like their men or do so only up to the waste. At that point all attempts to clothe themselves seem to stop, although t-shirts which are tight enough to perform the function of the non-existent brassiere are often seen. Also seen in this important tactical role are lots of leather halters, a title which is more fanciful than descriptive since they halt nothing and actually seem to encourage as much movement as possible. The children of bikers also like to imitate the attire of their parents. I saw a little doll of maybe 4 or 5 who was wearing a tiny black vest which proclaimed to all the world that she was "Daddy's little biker."

There are substrata in this society, as well. Some of them are obviously just regular folks who dress up for the part and go to the rallies, rather like a bank teller who tries never to miss a Mountain Man rendezvous and has won the tomahawk throwing contest three years running. Others --and these guys usually seem to be single -- are more tough-looking. They seem to be casting about for a possible insult to be avenged -- all the time. You get the impression that they LIVE on their bikes.

The one thing all of these folks seem to have in common is a profound and undeniable love of country. This made me feel quite comfortable among them, at least to the extent that an old History-teaching geek in a cotton shirt can feel comfortable among a couple of thousand former warriors clad in black leather. And, their doubtful position on being law-abiding citizens notwithstanding, most of them seem to be nice folks, quick to return a friendly greeting or to assist you in finding your way.

Another thing unites them. They hate (and I'm using that word advisedly and with ample consideration here) Peter Fonda's sister. Henry Fonda's daughter. Jane Fonda. "Hanoi Jane." A photograph which I took of the latrine will make this attitude abundantly clear. So would some of the jacket patches that were for sale at the rally, if only you could see them or if only I could quote them. But I try to keep this blog at about a PG or PG-13 level.

Many of the bikes have had attention, money, time, effort, and love lavished on them with marvelous results. Photos of examples are below. Let me explain one bike in particular. You will see here a photo of one Keith Grover, Captain, USA, Nat'l. Guard. His little son is asleep in his back-pack. He flies the Apache helicopter. His crew chief painted his bike. You'll see three photos of it just below Capt. Grover's picture. Keith is about the same age as my son, Joseph. They went through Air Force Junior ROTC (reserve officer training corps) together at Madison High in their senior year. Lots of good kids came out of that class and out of that program. My friends Fred Carcione (MSgt USAF, ret'd) and Rick Bensemon (Maj USAF, ret'd) were their instructors. You'll notice that Keith's footpegs are made of the 30mm rounds that he fires from his aircraft. You'll notice, too, that the flash suppressors from the same guns form his tail pipes.

Dave Wilkins, fellow High Priest and a veteran of some truly horrible days in Vietnam, paid $15 to get me into this event yesterday. Because of the spirituality which he has worked to build in his life, he says that he feels a little uncomfortable among the overtly and unrepentantly worldly folks that one meets at such a rally. But I'm glad I went. I came away refreshed in my belief in the old George Orwell quotation: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Alternative Endings

Most true stories have only one ending.

In recent years it has been possible to buy movies with a selection of endings. If the story doesn't turn out your way in one playing, simply make a switch and see it end in another way.



I've been wondering about that. Is it good for us? Most conveniences which have been invented down through the ages have been either obviously good or at least adaptable to good uses. Many such things were invented for military purposes and then applied to manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, mining, or some other positive thing. Not to imply that military purposes are always evil. Far from it! In many cases, one side in a war is demonstrably more righteous than another. And the Lord has explained that he uses the wicked to punish the wicked on occasion. Thus, the vicious Assyrians are used to fulfill the prophetic warnings to the northern ten tribes of Israel, carrying them away into slavery and scattering them to the various parts of the world, beginning in 722 BC.



But Assyria's own day of reckoning was coming. No nation which is in the habit of impaling tens of thousands of the citizens of captured cities can long escape the wrath of our God.



Then there were the Chaldean Babylonians. In about 585 BC they fulfilled more prophetic warnings by killing or capturing the remaining tribes, chiefly Judah (or the Jews) and carrying the few who lived through the invasion away into slavery in Babylon. But the Chaldeans, too, had to face their day of judgment. The Persians conquered them and released the Jews to go home and rebuild their city and their temple. Of course, the temple they built was nice, but it never quite lived up to the standards of the magnificent temple of Solomon, son of David.



So the Persians had been tools in the hands of God to save his people after they had been humbled. He promised that he would not forsake them forever, and He told the truth. But the Persians, too, became proud and aggressive. They spent 20 years trying to reduce the Greek city-states to Persian control. But at Marathon, Thermopylae (where King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans held them back for days!), and at Salamis the Hellenes proved themselves capable of uniting temporarily for the salvation of all Greeks. Their war chest was kept on the Island of Delos. So their military alliance was called The Delian League. But after the Persian wars, one city-state, Athens, tried to dominate all the money and some of the other city-states. And so they fell into the Pelepponesian wars in which the cities of Attica (the upper part of Greece) fought with the cities of the Pelepponesus (the ear-lobe-like part of Greece which hangs down in the south.)



Athens happened to be going through its short "Golden Age." That's when they became as democratic as they ever would. Athens had become the inspiration of the known world. It had the greatest architecture, the finest teachers, the best playwrights, and the most democratic government of any city-state then in existence. But they were defeated by the city states from the Pelepponesus, led by Sparta. This led one of Socrates' students, a fellow named Plato, to lose his faith in democracy. If it was such a good form of government, he reasoned, then how had Athens and its allies been defeated in the Pelepponesian War by mere monarchies and oligarchies?



In the midst of this humility, Athens had to become wary of a threat from the north, Philip II of Macedonia. For years he spread his growing empire by taking first one and then another city. One great Athenian gave a series of speeches warning that Philip was coming and that, if they didn't get ready for him, even the great Athens would be not only defeated as it had been in the Pelepponesian War, but occupied and would lose its sovereignty. This series of warning speeches became known as "The Philippics." And to this day any such speech of warning about a military threat is called that. Winston Churchill gave many "Philippics" about Hitler, but most members of the British Parliament didn't believe him.



After Philip's assassination, his son Alexander, about 20 years old, took over the empire his father had built and multiplied its size many times over. He conquered all the known world, clear over to the Indus River from which India gets its name. Hence his historical name, Alexander the Great. He died young. His generals fought over and divided his empire. One of them ruled over an area that included Jerusalem. The Macabee family, led by the great Judas Macabeus, led a rebellion against Greek occupation and influence. But Greek influence under Alexander had been so forcefully stamped on the world that a simplified form of the Greek language (Koine Greek) was spoken through thousands of miles of the ancient world, resulting in improved trade among all the cities and kingdoms of the ancient world. That's why scholars and attorneys and respected men of business, like Saul of Tarsus, spoke not only Aramaic in the land of Israel but also Greek. No one could be considered truly educated who didn't speak and read Greek.



No one admired and looked up to the Greeks more than the people from the little cow town of Rome over on the Italian peninsula. They wanted to be like the Greeks. They wanted to have their own little pet Greeks living as slaves in their homes and teaching their little Romans to speak Greek and know the plays and epic poems of Greece. Such slaves were called Pedagogues, the same name that private tutors in Greece had always been called. The science or art of teaching is still today called pedagogy. Of course, the best way to get everything you want from the culture you admire is to conquer it and steal it. So that's what Rome did. Even the Spartans were unable to stand up to them.



As Rome made an effort to conquer ever-outward, largely because of their fear of invasion from without, a fear that was based primarily on their horrible experience in the Second Punic War in which Hannibal Barca stomped around Italy for 15 years and couldn't be slowed down, let alone stopped, it eventually took lands that had been taken by great conquerors before. They took parts of Persia and Parthia, although those were always having to be reconquered. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had defeated Spartacus in the slave rebellion about 7 decades before Christ's birth in the land near Jerusalem, was surrounded one day in Persia, cut off from his men, and then cut off from his head. This was then boiled clean and scooped out so that it could be presented to the Persian leader. A legend says that he ladled molten gold into the skull of Crassus, saying, "There Crassus, you Roman bastard, you always wanted our Persian gold. Now you have your fill of it." Did this really happen? I don't know. I know Crassus died there. The rest of it makes a great story, but I have my doubts about parts of it.



Saul of Tarsus not only spoke Aramaic and his native Jewish tongue and Koine Greek, he also spoke Latin and had gained Roman citizenship to go with it. This gave him the protection of Roman law wherever he went. Thus, whenever he was arrested for preaching the Christian Gospel (after his conversion and his taking of the name Paul the Apostle) his Roman citizenship often got him out of tough situations. At least for a few years.



And who destroyed the Romans? Well, they largely destroyed themselves by abandoning their moral, political, and educational traditions, but their actual invaders were various Germanic tribes with names like Lombards, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and lots of others. They moved across the Rhine River and took up residence in areas that had for many years been controlled by Roman Legions. The Franks settled the area that today is called France. The Belgae settled Belgium. The Lombards settled that portion of Northern Italy which today is still called Lombardia (Lombardy in English.)



Four of the Germanic tribes moved across the channel and too Britannia away from the Romans who had controlled it for going on 4 centuries. One of the Romanized Celtic kings who tried to stop them was named Artorius. From him we get the stories of King Arthur. But the Germanic tribes just kept on coming, even for generations. Britannia was eventually possessed by the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Frisians. They didn't necessarily bring all of their people with them. Saxe still exists in Germany. There is an area of Holland where they still speak Frise, a language very much like English. But Britannia became known for the first of these four invading tribes, the Angles. It became Angle-land. Or England, today. Later came the Norse or Vikings for about 200 years of annual summer raids in which they killed Anglo-Saxon men, stole gold and food, and took Anglo-Saxon daughters off to Scandinavia with them to help them keep up the Viking population. Eventually, the Northmen settled in England, at least some of them.



Then came the French-speaking Vikings (Normans) in the year 1066 who conquered the Anglo-Saxons and made them second class citizens in what had been their own homeland for centuries.The Normans added 10,000 French words to English. By the time another 500 years had passed, you couldn't have understood the original Anglish or Saxonish languages if your life depended on it. Because by now, modern English had been created. By now, people like William Shakespeare were learning to make it into beautiful poetry and great drama.



This isn't really the direction I intended to go tonight. I intended to talk about some TV shows I've seen lately and how I could have wished for them to end. Maybe I'll do that soon anyway. I just got rolling on the History and it kept on rolling out of me. If there's anything here related to the title I started out with, it is that History, unlike movies, usually has one ending. You can interpret it in different ways, but those who are conquered or enslaved or killed or promoted or enthroned tend to stay that way. There are no alternative endings.

Is It A Plot?

The Model 1894 Winchester, a descendant of the Henry mentioned in the penultimate paragraph.

Last fall I wrote about some new sci fi shows that had begun on TV and which pleased me greatly. Only one of them will survive into a second season of new episodes, I believe. That one is called Fringe. I finally realized recently where I'd seen the actor who plays the mildly insane, absolutely brilliant physicist named Walter in that show. He's the same fellow who played to the hilt the role of the Steward of Gondor in the Tolkein films. You know, the father of Boromir and Faramir? Whoa! What an actor. His show deserves to live on and apparently it will.

But I've noticed a trend throughout my life which manifests itself so consistently that it bespeaks of a plot of some kind. I don't know who's behind the plot, but it's definitely there. It works like this. Someone comes up with a great show. The situation is cleverly different, the characters well drawn and well played. The music, costumes, photography, and direction all scintillate. It promotes thought. It thrills the intellect and the heart all at once. It entertains. It is wonderful!

It is doomed.

A really good show will never last. Someone, and I don't know who but I suspect he's in league with Satan, always sees to it that a great show gets cancelled. This usually happens after its first thirteen episodes, but sometimes it happens even sooner. Occasionally, the secret forces behind this phenomenon will allow the show to run for a whole year before jerking the rug out from under our feet. Once, back in the eighties, a tremendous series which was set in 1963 and was called Crime Story, made it all the way to the end of season two. Then, in the last episode of the season, and with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER, all the major characters go down in the same airplane! To this day there are probably people who lived in Moscow at that time who still get cold sweats after dark and ask themselves what the source was of that unearthly howl which split the Idaho panhandle's night air. But I know. It was my own lament, torn from my throat by the wrenching realization that Dennis Farina's character, Michael Torello and Anthony Dennison's character, Ray Luca, would never again trade vicious threats and warm lead. Pauly Taglia (whose surname means "cuts") would never again casually drive over someone with a semi in order to provide transplant organs to save a dying mafioso. Nor would he ever again say something delightfully stupid like when he asked Ray "Who is this guy Dom Perrignon?" Pauly thought he might be trying to cut in on their action in the alcohol trade.

I was enthralled by a show last year called New Amsterdam. A 17th century Dutch guy saves a Native American girl's life from another cheese-head who gets drunk and comes after her with a sword. The good guy winds up "mostly dead" (sorry, Miracle Max.) The girl's mom blesses the good Dutchman with long life. Really long life. So long, in fact, that he has to reinvent himself every twenty years or so in order to keep people from realizing that he's really 400 years old. For a while, he'll go by the name Amsterdam. Then he'll use the monicker York. (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. The city has been called both since its settlement in about 1624. First, New Amsterdam, then New York.) Sometimes people almost catch on, like the time a girlfriend recognizes his 30-something face in a painting that was more than 70 years old.

The perpetually young hero sometimes pours out his sorrows to an aging bartender - - who is really Amsterdam's son whom he sired when he had a fling in the thirties with a gorgeous black singer. This show was wonderful in every respect. So, naturally, it's gone.

Sanctuary, about a 150 year old woman who doesn't look a day over 36 and is at least as appealing as her gorgeous teenage daughter, was another "too-good-to-last" show. Actually, I think they're going to re-run last year's episodes on the Sci Fi channel which has recently redubbed itself SyFy for no apparent reason. It was about a place which acts as both safe-haven and control for creatures and variant-humans which society isn't ready to know about just yet. The centenarian beauty who runs the outfit owns a Germanic castle which has somehow escaped the notice of everyone else on the outskirts of NYC. OK. I didn't say it was perfect. I just said I liked it.

Life on Mars was another fun one this past winter. A police detective from today gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He's still on the force in the same Big Apple, but his clothes are way out of style. So is his hair. So are most of his opinions and attitudes. But he's so good at his job that New York's finest of 1973 decide to keep him on. He gets weirded out occasionally, like when he sees someone on TV whom he knows will soon be assassinated or when he sees his 6 year old self or his alcoholic father, or his needy and lovely mother. He really wants to help her, but if he hangs around too much, she'll take it the wrong way. And she wants to take it the wrong way, because she has no idea that the nice guy with the clean-shaved sideburns is actually her son.

The girl just down the hall in his apartment building slips him some drugs and he wakes up handcuffed to his own bed and without benefit of clothing. And people who have no idea that AIDS is just around the corner are practicing "free love" with an expertise which might imply that they need no practice at all! To complicate all this, he occasionally hears people from the present trying to contact him. He assumes that he's in a coma and just needs to wake up for all the 1973 stuff to go away. But he's developing a soft spot in his heart for the uniformed only-girl-on-the-force down in his office.

Naturally, this one got the axe, too. At least I think it did, because the network hasn't mentioned it in months. It has ever been thus.

I recall a western back in the seventies which Shaynie and I really liked. They made a pilot movie and said it would be a new series. But it never was. It mixed western grittiness with a bit of spooky quasi-magic. It was called Hunter's Moon. The protagonist rode around with an inverted sheepskin vest on and a Henry rifle resting on his right knee. The ignorant network wanted to imply that there was something extra powerful about the Henry, but, of course, the only thing special about it was not its power but the fact that it would go bang 15 times before you had to stop to reload it. But I was willing to overlook that faux pas if only they would run the series. They didn't.

I'd be willing to bet (if I were a betting man) that this has happened to you, too. Some show that seemed too good to be true turned out to be just that. It disappeared before you had a good mouthful of it. Perhaps you'd be good enough to share some descriptions or titles of such stillborn series with me. But don't bother if it's going to upset you. Really! I understand...

Pocatello's Pioneer Day Parade - A Bit Early

A Target of Opportunity

It had been many years since I attended a Pioneer Day celebration. This one was six days early, but what the heck! The weather was right' the participants seemed to be in the spirit of the thing, and there were things and people of beauty as far as the eye could see. The fact that I had to take these pictures with my phone and then edit them on the computer hours later didn't seem to ruin the overall effect.

The young woman in the yellow who is holding a 5 year old in green is Samantha, daughter of Larry and Wanda Wilde. Larry is one of Sheryl's siblings. Samantha just came home from more than a year as an air traffic controller in Iraq. After this period of leave, it looks like she'll be sent back over there. The kids these days call it being sent "down range." It's a horrid but very apt expression. Down range, after all, is where the bullets impact. Already she has lost friends and co-workers over there. Britney, her 5 year old, hasn't seen her in about a year. She tends to cling to her mom, which seems entirely appropriate to us.

All the cars except the T-bird on top were in today's parade. The T-bird I took as a target of opportunity while walking home last Monday from cleaning up the church building we use. Those T-birds from the early sixties are my idea of what a car should look like. Well, anyway, one of my ideas.

A Moment of Remembrance

Actually, I experience many moments of pleasant recollection of my little family back when I was a young father. I've often told young families that they are living the "good old days" right now. And they are. I promise you. No matter how broke you are or how many kids are sick or broken, the fact that you are all still together means that this day qualifies as one of the good old days.

Some folks our age seem to like the whole empty nest thing. I think they're crazy. The happiest times of my life were all between 1974 and when the last one went on a mission.

A Memorable Weekend; But Will I Remember It?

The CZ 550 in 9.3x62mm. Well nigh perfect.

I had fun yesterday. I taught both Sunday School and Priesthood today. All of this went pretty well. But will I remember it a few weeks or months from now? If the answer is yes, it will only be because of my journal and this blog. I was just mentioning to Mary minutes ago how great it is that she so often catches up her family blog. It will be a precious family history some day. Each child will want to have a copy, and they'll sit together as young adults and laugh over the pictures and stories about themselves.

We Latter-day Saints are a record-keeping people. Always have been. Always should be. So I'll record some details of this weekend.

Earlier this week, brother Rosen called and asked me to take his Gospel Doctrine class while he was out of town. I cheerfully acceded to the request, but, even as I put the phone down, it occurred to me that it was the second Sunday, always my turn to teach the High Priests. At first I was mildly worried. Then it occurred to me that for 20 years I had taught several classes per day, five days per week, 36 weeks per year, and hadn't come to any harm from it. So I relaxed.



The Sunday School lesson, on early missionary work in the restored Church, was a pleasure to teach and even allowed me to discuss some of the political climate of the day as the Members of the Twelve were leaving Kirtland to go on missions. It was the Jacksonian era. Other big names like Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Davy Crockett, the Alamo, Nicholas Biddle, and his Second Bank of the United States all crowded into the forefront of my thoughts. I briefly described the Bank War and the Panic of 1837, and two persons in the class mentioned the financial troubles the Saints were having right along with the rest of the country. I got to talk about "moving the deposits," the most controversial thing Jackson ever did. Even killing Dickinson, hanging Armbrister and Arbuthnot, and invading Florida had not made him so many enemies. But he was Andy Jackson, and he'd never been known to back down from a fight. And he won that fight, too. The Bank was destroyed, Biddle was the loser, and, when it all caused a financial panic the year after Jackson moved back to Nashville, it was Martin Van Buren who got the blame.



I regret that Jackson never met Joseph Smith. I think they'd have liked each other instinctively.



The Priesthood lesson on the importance of building temples and Joseph Smith's personal anxiety to see it get done was an easy thing to discuss with a bunch of old guys like myself. Many of them are much better men than me, though. I think that the majority of them never have those selfish tendencies to hanker after worldly goods that I live with.



Saturday was a delight. Sheryl miraculously found enough money for us to buy a marked-down scope for my 9.3x62mm rifle which had battered the old scope to pieces. It kicks a little.





When I rezeroed it at the public range yesterday, I finished with the 286 grain Nosler Partition going 1 inch high at 100 yards, the 286 grain Woodleigh round nose going 1 1/2" right of that, and the 286 grain Woodleigh solid going about 1 1/2" directly below the Nosler. So my hunting and stopping loads all go to about the same place, the mark of a fine rifle. And no one has ever put criticism of a CZ rifle in print that I know of.



There is something unutterably satisfying about knowing that one is in possession of a medium bore rifle that is accurate and is also the equal of any creature that walks on this continent. I just couldn't stop smiling yesterday evening. And this evening I got to talk with Joseph on the phone for about half an hour!



If I could be guaranteed that all weekends would go as this one did, I'd be perfectly satisfied.

The Wonderful Things We Don't Need

Years ago I read of a Buddhist monk who had risen to a high position in his religion. He was invited to visit America. When he got here, his hosts took him to a huge department store which was far bigger than anything he'd ever seen. He gasped and said, "Oh, my! Look at all the wonderful things I don't need." His religion and the attitude it had instilled in him did not leave him in the crucial moment.

Stephen King once wrote a story which, like manyof his stories, became a creepy movie. In it, a charming old gentleman moves into a small town and sets up a second hand store. He has a knack for convincing each person who walks into the shop that he has the one thing they really need to achieve happiness. Only after the townspeople turn on each other and married folks begin murdering each other does it become obvious that the old gentleman is none other than the one known in Stephen Vincent Benet's stories as "Mr. Scratch."

I'm not quite as good as the old Buddhist fellow, but I have learned that there are some things I don't actually need but only wish I could have. Herewith, a few photographic examples of such things.