Stockholm at Noon

After the train passed the tenements bedecked with fluttering laundry, I passed Kungsgatan St.  From that vantage point you get a more characteristic view of Stockholm and what big cities should look like: movie theaters, big corporate offices like Casco, UR & Penn, and sidewalks full of shoppers.  In the background is PUB, a plush department store where Greta Garbo once worked.  Thankfully, the Swedes had a noticeable lack of skyscrapers and have managed to keep Stockholm’s building humanely proportional.  Viewing through Goggle’s Street Level, I’m shocked to see so many changes; so much new glass and steel construction.  I didn’t recognize the train station, but it’s still fun to see where I’d been after more than 36 years.

Edvard Ohrström’s Crystal obelisk in the city’s big square (Sergels Torg) is an example.  It still looks like a big ugly camshaft complete with carbon burns, but the surroundings are now unrecognizable.  Where’s the Länssparbanken?  So much has changed and so have I; I could walk in the days – mile after mile and barely feel it and the one time I did rest was in a cemetery with tombstones dating from the 1600s.  I’m glad I went in my youth, but Stockholm has its marvelous subway system, with those one inch square white tiles and clean as a whistle.  It’s also safe at night.

I went to the Maritime Museum and took pictures along the waterfront and its placid marinas.  I was lucky to get a few taken in the sunshine because September in Stockholm goes very quickly.   The Warship Wasa which sank on its maiden voyage in 1628, was salvaged and made into a museum east of the city, but I’m embarrassed to admit I missed it.  There were the Ostermans Aero helicopter tours and I missed them too, I’ve learned since that sometimes you have to spend a little more to get a little more.  (I got hooked on that type of touring in Kauai as a passenger on a Navy helicopter (mandatory hours flight) just like in the scenes from Jurassic Park.)  I also include a shot of the Nordic Museum.

The Passion of Dr. James D. Bales

The photo is as accurate as I remember the scene when I used to go to Dr. Bales’ office for communist literature.  Articles on the Internet say he collected over 10,000 books and wrote 70 or more books.  It’s said he was the ghost writer for J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit.  I loved it when he’d point out the contradictions of Communism with quotes from The Worker, the Vietnam Courier, or the World Marxist Review. As a graduate of Berkeley – no less – J.D. Bales also debated atheism with Carl Sagan in 1966.  I liked him immediately because he was a fighter.  I also gleaned from the Internet recently many anecdotes I did not know about Dr. Bales.  I did not recall that he was the primary researcher for the National Education Program (NEP) at Harding College and the close associate of George S. Benson, its creator.  I didn’t recall that both formed a formidable national conservative think tank that fought the Left.

Perhaps it was his influence or just the pragmatic necessity to store research material, but over the 40 years since college, I did the same thing with hundreds of books and articles.  With my 4-drawer Sears filing cabinet, it was on a much smaller scale, of course.  I liked biographies the most. They add color, content, and meaning to history.  Perhaps my own collections made my writing of Journal of the Silent Majority inevitable with its 700 plus footnotes. I’m fascinated by history, but the influence that Dr. Bales had on my writing was co-incidental, suggestive or maybe osmotic,and certainly not planned or deliberate; I’d basically forgotten him.

I do remember Dr. Bale’s consuming quest to expose militant atheism, but after college I never thought too much about it because working for a living took up most of my time.  Still, I read and kept up with what was going on in America and it wasn’t pretty: riots, moral decline, attacks on religion and every other institution.  What was the source of these attacks?  I read about the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution and found clues.  I followed our 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver by reading their biographies and a common denominator reared its ugly head – militant atheism, the very thing Dr. Bales had always written about. 

Dr. Bales’ emphasis on the study of militant atheism made a lasting impression on me.  He reaffirmed the role of spirituality and religion in the interpretation of history.  His encyclopedic mind and research techniques validated the scholarship that we history majors were being taught and provided us with a reservoir of facts and arguments supporting our own political views as a part of the Baby Boom Generation and Silent Majority and  . . . who knows where his contagious passion came from?  Maybe it was innate or incomprehensible, but I can only guess it came from the same thrill of discovery that motivated me.

Sanitizing the 60s Black Radicals

Now is a perfect time for the Left to intensify their revision of history; the Worst Elements are giddy with their unstoppable onslaughts.  Pot and homosexual marriage are well on schedule to become nationally legal with the artificial help of the Media, presidential decrees, and Federal Judges.  I’ve written about it before, but something new seems to be in the air.

After years of withering on the vine, favorable stories about the 1960s black revolutionaries seem to be intensifying.  I noticed in reviewing many school books on the history of the U.S. that their names and roles were/are temporarily left out of the chapters on the Civil Rights Movement.  Perhaps the Politically Correct view that movement as only a legal and legislative quest, but I don’t because I lived through it and remember its most telling inconvenient truth.  The stratagem of Provocation (Violence)-Crisis-Reward, unfortunately, did more for the movement than non-violent protest.  Apparently, the truth about the 60s black militants is too inconvenient for academia, so the players are being reincarnated.

The Left loves its heroes and does not like to forget them, at least now in a more measured way.  So those heroes are coming back in a sanitized way.  They are currently black princes and Robin Hoods who have been misunderstood.  H. Rap Brown, “I’ll burn the White House down!” Eldridge Cleaver, Huey “Off the Pig!” Newton, “By any means necessary” Malcolm X, and currently, “We’re going to tear this country down!” Stokely Carmichael – all on the FBI’s old Rabble Rouser Index.  I expect them to reemerge shortly in the school books.

If you watch left leaning CNN or the socialist mother ship, MSNBC, you noticed that Stokely  Carmichael has captivated another author who is granted national media coverage to hail Carmichael’s checkered legacy.   He’s now benign – a crusader - and someone you’d want to invite to dinner.  I remember another Stokely: proponent of Black Nationalism who was influenced by Young Socialists and Young Communists; an adherent of socialist revolution and violence (SNCC); a 1968 Washington, D.C. riot instigator; and one, like Jane Fonda, traveled to Hanoi in 1967 to offer his support to the Communists during the Vietnam War.  Read, study, and don’t forget.

Karlstad on the Klara River

I followed the same mountainous route on my ride east towards Stockholm when I met an old white haired school teacher from one of America’s northern states.  She was making her final journey to her roots.  She could speak broken Swedish because her parents were Swedes and she became the delight of the other passengers.    She said I looked like someone she had a crush on when she was young.  Later we stopped at a small town west of Karlstad where I spent the night.  It was a classy place and their TV had some pretty good 1930’s movies playing. 

The next morning I arrived at Karlstad in Värmland which is a region above Lake Vänern that has a southern canal that links to the Baltic.  From the train station I walked down the banks of the purple Klara River on the grounds of what is now called the Värmlands Museum.  (I don’t remember the museum.)  My picture shows me in my old plaid CPO still popular in 1977.  Near a birch tree grove I photographed a classical bronze statue worthy of a picture.  In my opinion Scandinavia has too much of what I call “Slag Art.”

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My night’s stay in Karlstad was at a private residence that had a TV with High Definition.  They showed hospital operations and specials on how Swedish teenagers were going bad.  There was also a commercial about socialism that played a catchy tune about shirkers.  Before dark, I was going through the park when I noticed a man jogging in black tights.  I thought he looked like the cartoon character Pepe Le Pew in pursuit.  This is another example of how America is several years behind European customs and fashions.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t jogging tights for men arrive many years later in the middle to late 1980’s? 

Instead of McDonald’s Karlstad had hamburger joints called Clocks.  This one was not impressive - small, poor service, and not very clean.  It reminded me of a ticket booth.  After I finished eating, I glanced at the crowd and saw what surely was my twin walking about 10 feet away.  It was spooky and has it has never happened to me before or since.  It’s said everyone has a twin somewhere.

Ukraine: A U.S. Dilemma

President Obama is in a difficult position.  On the one hand he has to project an appearance of strength on the world stage.  On the other, his election was symbolically a reaction to the wars started by George W. Bush which still seem endless.  Obama’s election meant a time-out for the military industrial complex to cool its jets and for a peace dividend to help trim the federal deficit and time to give the Left’s progressives opportunities to advance their agendas which it has successfully allowed, unfortunately.

On queue, the far Right and its pantheon of war hawks like John McCain began their armchair criticisms stopping just short of advocating thermo nuclear retaliation.  I’m surprised not seeing the Neo Conservatives who fanned the flames of war against Iraq and the rest of the world in their Utopian strategies to spread global democracy through war – an insane idea.  People like that want war for war’s sake.  George W. Bush invaded Iraq, a country that did not threaten us or even have weapons of mass destruction.  What kind of credibility does the United States have when it engages in such inflammatory rhetoric?  Why do we have to play World Cop?

At least Vladimir Putin and Russia have a stake in Crimea – a cultural, historic, and, above all, a strategic connection with Russia.  Putin’s policy is not “Retro” like the TV twenty- somethings who feel obligated to offer their two cents on foreign policy.  It would be better for them to keep their comments to themselves or focus them on the fashions of the Academy Awards or the latest celebrity incarceration; the idea of Putin coming to the aid of an ally unlawfully displaced is nothing new – certainly not Retro. 

What Putin did is old Real Politic, but perhaps the way he did it is new and perhaps right out of George W’s playbook.  Putin may be telling the truth when he said that no Russian troops were involved in the take-over of Crimea.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if they turned out to be Blackwater type “private contractors” like the mercenaries we hired to proxy-fight our own wars?