Editor’s Note: I had an extended conversation with Marlow yesterday. It included an update on his progress on the book exploring his new home in the Coastal Empire of Savannah. I had been working on a small story of a Great Man who passed this week. The individual was Walter “Fritz” Mondale, a former Vie President who passed this life at the age of 93. He visited our ship, the USS Midway, as we were anchored in the lovely port city of Hong Kong in 1979. In those days we were dealing with a migration of people who had no means of documenting themselves. They were fleeing the Communist government that had been established in Vietnam, and their movement across the water was considered a crisis at the time.
Mr. Mondale’s visit was a big deal, though reading the memories of the people who managed it made me remember my part in it, which was to look, eye to eye, with people on the boats we passed close aboard while moving to anchor. Then I remember taking the Star Ferry over to the Kowloon side, and what seemed like a couple days orbiting the bar at a wonderful place called “Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.” Ned was an Australian outlaw, shot dead by police. So, within a single paragraph it made me recall that there is little new in this world. Only different treatments of the same thing. Here are some thoughts from Marlow about the concept not under discussion at the moment. American Glory. I also discovered a need to create a new footnote on Falcon Codes.
-Vic

American Glory

Here we are, in all our American glory — a strange rich set of clans, with our fantastic mixtures of success and impracticality, our hard and crazy-assed monied sense and nonsense, our visionary fanaticisms, our astonishing contradictions — plans to fix business with no business methods, frantic enemies of Capital who ignore Capital’s loyal service to the country over ten lifetimes to the things they demand, keen wit, great laughs, animal charm, insane miserliness towards protecting our wealth, property and friends, while lavishly spending and indenturing our children’s children’s children.

Modern Americans are no rebels. We have no more need for rebellion than have most free men in the world, which is to say none at all. We are quite content with any system which gives us comfort, security, enough money to do as we like, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what we chose. So, why do we stand idly by, while these beltway parvenues try to reform our American DNA discovered and declared two and half centuries ago? Yet, we’re endlessly told to treat these squawking crows’ thoughts as great utterances and encouraged to shout from our windows, porches, and stoops “They’re true! Green! Good! We shall absorb our negation!”

These cocks that are crowing midnight have elvish ghostly cries. These crows drug us with sleep and death like a distant horn sounding across a be-fogged, grey sea. To me it’s a warning to all that we are about to die, and to America’s ghosts that they too must go home.

Should we be the cocks that’ll crow morning — voices as shrill as any revolutionary fife which say we are done with sleep? Or are we done as death makes friends with us? More importantly, will America’s response be crickets across the growing darkness’s enormous silence or multiple bird chirpings as they’re awakening?

So, to avoid their crowed negation, I shall not, as you suggest, directly criticize their bigoted language and totalitarian goals. Let me contribute a tongue in cheek damning of them with faint praise by saying they will lift the moral, emotional and intellectual levels of the American state two inches. Huzzahs for such spirit, character, service, and leadership.

I think there’re several Falcon Codes for this as well, no?

-Marlow
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