Time to read and think

15º 59.226s 145º 22.705w

Sat Jun 08 2019

As a kid I used to read like a fiend, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but also the occasional “quality read”, such as the seriously fat book “Shogun” by James Clavell, a 1000+ page paperback that took all of Christmas vacation one year. When I get into a book nothing else gets done, so for years during my working life and even on the boat really good “suck me in” books have been avoided. That changed after moving aboard JollyDogs, even with all the knowledge left to gain to make this lifestyle safe and satisfying there’s finally time to read for sheer pleasure.

I met Jim McChesney while jumping and flying at Marana Skydiving Center back in 1986. His rigging skills saved my life when my brand-new parachute rig malfunctioned on opening due to a manufacturing tolerance issue. Per tradition Jim got to name his price, and if I recall a big bottle of Jack Daniels was his reward. Smokin’ deal for me. Jim and I also flew together at the Collegiate National Skydiving Championships back in the 80’s and we did a bit of SCUBA diving down in Mexico. Sometime in the early 90’s we lost touch - fast forward to around 2008. I flew our RV-6 down to Casa Grande for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s “Copper State” regional fly-in, and there was Jim marshaling aircraft to parking. Turned out he had left the skydiving business and retrained as a critical care nurse but was also building an RV-7 and had gotten really involved in the EAA. Not too long afterwards I started taking him flying in our RV-6 to help familiarize him with the performance and handling qualities, and he gave me a beer making lesson. A win-win!

Unbeknownst to me, Jim had really gotten into home brewing and had even entered a contest sponsored by Samuel Adams. Apparently the first-place prize was Sammy brewing and selling something like 5000 barrels of your recipe. Second place was a T-shirt. Well, Jim got the T-shirt; not too shabby, and I’ve always bragged about the guy who taught me to make such good beer. Now he’s so busy finishing up the RV-7 in his garage that he’s taken a hiatus from the brewing hobby just to focus on getting flying. I think he’s into fine whiskey these days. . .

Anyway, Jim gave me a book recently, entitled “Forgotten Fifteenth, The Daring Airmen Who Crippled Hitler’s War Machine”. I generally don’t ready historical stuff as I don’t have the right sort of noggin’ for that, but this book was about airplanes and how the air war supported the end of WWII in which my daddy was an infantryman in, so I had at it and pretty soon I was done. An excellent read, and one which helped me appreciate the appalling loss of life in WWII. I’m pretty sure no Western country has the intestinal fortitude and political will to even imagine doing that again, but as warfare is moving ever more towards machines blowing things up, and especially our superior machines blowing up the equipment and people of less wealthy and influential countries with little political clout, we’ll hopefully never find out. There are several failed societies around the world which produce some real baddies and they are a problem, but we’re also getting a lot of blowback created by many years of bad government policy decisions, it’s all coming home to roost.

When I was a kid in the 60’s and the Vietnam war was raging, my recollection is that rock ‘n roll was the musical genre that pushed back against the misuse of political power and military might; but more recently the songs that seem to be saying that to me are country/western, perhaps call rockabilly? One song that comes to mind has lyrics thanking American soldiers for their willingness to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever to die or get their legs blown off so that the rest of us back home can enjoy our high-speed internet, gas guzzling cars, and a more free-wheelin’ way of life. No reason to sacrifice here as long as a few of our folks are willing to die for the rest of us.

It’s a conversational topic that occasionally comes up among cruisers from various nations around the globe. In the last few weeks we’ve shared time and thoughts with folks from France, England, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and more. It is a bit troubling how much civil freedom and privacy folks are willing to give up in order for their governments to “keep them safe”. There’s a pretty fuzzy line between that and the government knowing everything about everyone, then using the information in nefarious ways. I’ve got a pal with a brother in the FBI, and he’s made it pretty clear that we might as well assume that Uncle Sam already knows everything about us. We’ve all sacrificed personal privacy in order to have the convenience of smart phones, credit cards and electronic banking that will work everywhere, and to keep our “friends” informed on Facebook, the internet beast that completely redefined what the word “friend” even means.

As my old boss of many jobs ago used to say, opinions are like assholes; everybody’s got one. I’ve just about concluded that a stint of mandatory civil or military service should be required for anyone to enjoy all the benefits of a democratic society that values freedom, law and order. Now there’s lobbing a hand grenade into the room. . .