Charles Krauthammer

Some people transcend time and space – here’s one. It is a little around a year and a half from his passing, which still is a national tragedy. I miss this man and his common sense genius greatly. He was such a fixture on Fox News and in our lives. I always made it a point to see Bret Baier’s show every night to hear what Charles had to say about the vagaries of the political tomfoolery of the day gone by – and now he is gone. I wish I could have met him in person. He was a class act, and one well-worthy of emulation.
But his legacy lives on, just get his last book “Things that Matter” – I keep a copy next to my bed and will read a passage or two every night like it is some kind of common sense writer’s Bible; not that my own work exhibits much religiosity – yeah, too many F-bombs. I’m better than that and am trying to clean up my act but sometimes, I can’t help my fucking self. Charles was also a fellow Harvard alumnus, so Vic and I share that academic bond, given that we sealed it up in Boston in a place that Dick Nixon called “The Kremlin on the Charles.” His son has just recently completed an unfinished work waiting to be released and I hope he can measure up to the father in capturing his last precious thoughts.

Call me an idiot, but I didn’t realize until late that Charles was a paraplegic. He hid it well, just like FDR did, for almost 50 years. Those of us who stride the world with arrogant confidence need to be mindful of the fact that misfortune and disaster could strike us at any moment – the wolf is always at the door.
We who choose to employ words to make a living draw upon a wide variety of inspirational role models to emulate – for me, Charles is one, but there are others. A lot of obvious choices out there are Hemingway, WEB Griffin, Philip K. Dick, Vic Socotra, etc. There are also artistic and musical influences and creative works of visual and sonic wonders that stretch your heart strings – see Picasso’s “les demoiselles d’avignon, Wassily Kandinsky’s “Landscape with Red Spot” of which I have a framed poster print I bought from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during a memorable weekend in Venice hanging on my wall, or just dial up on YouTube Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” Gustav Holst’s Planet Symphony, or Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” as bookends. I always try to work in past and current pop cultural references in the literary imagery I try to compose, as well as other smart-ass shit, questionable innuendoes, and evocations of time and place that transport you gentle readers to exotic places like Paris or Hong Kong. I really have taken to Vic’s format of incorporating graphics into the unique screedology I am in the busy process of perfecting – it does pack a visual, visceral punch.

les demoiselle’s d’avignon
I used to cajole my Air Wing JOs when I had assigned them to writing analysis to use that opportunity to hone their writing skills – I had a mantra – create a “clichéa day.” Well, the new measure is to create a word that you cannot find in a Google search and I have just done it again – go ahead, Google “screedology” – there will be no results. Here’s my wiki entry, since I now own it forever:
screedology
/skrēd ah low gee/
Noun

“A term describing a long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious.”

Well, not that flattering I guess, but I’ll take it – it’s not often that you get the chance to defeat Google.

The few out there that know my real identity ask me how I come up with this stuff – I can say truly that I don’t rightly know. In Latin it is best expressed as “quod est quod” – it is what it is. But maybe there’s a better explanation.

The act of creative writing, for those of us who indulge in it, is a curious combination of Indian torture and sexual release when you’re done – except I’m never done. Vic can tell you that he will get four, five, six or more versions of these pieces before he can post the penultimate one. It is never good enough – and when I read something that is now indelibly committed to web land, I still spot errors and omissions, bad wording choices, and ways to make it better – always. As Sam Kinison famously acted out in an on-stage skit, it never ends. There may be one explanation, and it is heredity. We Finns are a curious mix of Hungarian Magyars, Mongols, Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, and Nordic mystics. Our native language (of which I can’t speak a word of by the way) is one of the most complex ones on earth – ranking up there with Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Urdu. Throw in my Mississippi and Alabama hillbilly tendencies, then you can start to understand some of the off-of-the-wall BS I come up with. Maybe another picture can illustrate the demons I have to wrestle with amidst the kaleidoscopic chaos of my thoughts – I hearken back to that weekend in Venice where and when I achieved a moment of clarity, as if:

Wassily Kandinsky – Landscape with Red Spot – 1913

Maybe this starts to explain it. I am starting to realize that I don’t have a lot of time left – and as my friend Billy Ed likes to observe on the implacable ticking time clock of mortality “…it’s later than you think.” So it’s time to spread my weary wings and take a few more cat shots in the cockpit of a new supersonic strike fighter of my own design – I just wrote my first country music song the other night; should have done it years ago.

For my fellow Socotrans out there, keep up the good work and the high quality of what we inflict upon our wider audience. We are not casting pearls before swine, but exploring our inner quests for perfection – in our own idiosyncratic styles, in an effort to educate as well as entertain. I challenge you going forward to try harder to find the right themes, the right turns of phrase, and the right words. And for our gentle readers out in NIP world, imbed it in your lizard brains that writing well is an important skill, whether you do it to make a living as an intel professional, or just having fun – ideally, you can do both. And moreover, telling tantalizing and inspirational stories in whatever you do that sew intellectual and emotional mayhem, and deeply resonate about things that matter is a worthy endeavor – and a higher calling.

That’s what Charles did on writing – so it’s good enough for me. Study his style; I am trying to do my best to be as erudite albeit a poor runner-up at best. No one will ever again be Charles, but that does not mean you can’t try to be as good, or even better, in your own style.

I wish you a happy and even more prosperous 2020 and as always, I remain your faithful servant.

Copyright 2019 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com

[1]With apologies to Carl von Clausewitz.