Stick with this one please. You will be surprised and sad. But, as of this writing, you will be FREE. Because you are. Unlike millions of humans around the world.
Theophile J. Waelbrock, 2/1/1922 - 10/17/1940, San Gabriel CA Photo Credit: Ric Leczel
I composed this playlist today walking to the cemetery. Or rather, it composed itself on my walk. Enjoy.
There is a lot going on in this post today. Because there is a lot going on in this head today. In an effort to pour the marbles and rocks out of my head so I could rearrange them later, I decided to walk to the San Gabriel Mission Cemetery.
Six of my family members are buried there. A set of Great-Great Grandparents from Belgium. A Great-Great Grandma from Quebec. And Uncle Theophile. More about him below.
I enjoy the cemetery because it is old and many of the tombstones are stand up. I understand the flat ones for labor reduction, but the old ones sure tell more stories. A future post about old-time tombstones might be a fun fabbit-ho. I want to find a Civil War Veteran.
Anyways, my meanders across the sacred grounds started presenting a certain class of decedent. Veterans. Every few steps. Some killed during their service. Some making it home and living long happy lives, some pictures show.
But so many. And so proud. In death as they were in life I am sure. I don’t know any of them. But now I know some of their stories. Their rank. Their war. Their branch. For some, I know their love. For others, I feel their pain of aloneness.
I dusted off a stone today that was caked with mud and grass. The death date was 1906. Who remembers him? I did today, and said a prayer for him.
The people in Ukraine need prayers. But they need a whole hell of a lot more. I fear the world is waiting until it’s over. Then all we will have left is prayers. Empty prayers for a dead country. Happening in real-time. With color analysts and graphics.
A post was waxed and polished, ready to roll down the alley to nail a strike. But I have to pause and make some observations about the war that just broke out. That post is below if you want a distraction from the current events. I will pick up its threads at some point. I fear being occupied mentally by the same evil force now occupying Ukraine.
Can you imagine if that were to occur here? I half-jokingly told a friend today that I would join the effort if it did. She scoffed and said I was too old. Maybe not, right?
Not an expert, but Vladimir Putin is a homicidal megalomaniac. From Russia With Hate.
The incomprehensible reality is that, in the 21st Century, we are experiencing in real time the string of events that played out in 1914 and 1939. Czar Putin has literally overtaken not only an independent (corrupt) sovereign country, but the combined psyche and psychosis of the world. (Spoiler: Katherine the Great is his favorite Czar).
Russia's Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia attends the United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine with Russia, in New York City, U.S., February 23, 2022. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
We pay Russia for a lot of our stuff. And China too, for that matter. I don’t know about you, but that sounds kind of, uhm, totally fucking stupid.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA - FEBRUARY 21, 2022: Russia's President Vladimir Putin addresses the nation on the recognition of independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. Alexei Nikolsky/Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/TASS (Photo by Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images)
ALEXEI NIKOLSKY/TASSS
As tensions rise between Russian and Ukraine, one of the issues being discussed a lot in the West is what a military conflict may do to oil prices.
Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers. According to the 2021 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2020 Russia produced 10.1 million barrels per day (BPD) of crude oil and natural gas condensate. That was good for second place behind the U.S. at 11.3 million BPD. Saudi Arabia was third at 9.3 million BPD.
However, the U.S. also consumes far more oil (17.2 million BPD) than Russia (3.2 million BPD) or Saudi Arabia (3.5 million BPD). The net result is that the U.S. is a net importer of crude oil, while Russia and Saudi Arabia are major crude oil exporters.
This also means that the U.S. economy is more vulnerable to oil price shocks, while higher oil prices are a net benefit to Russia and Saudi Arabia. Various talking heads have suggested that there will be a $5-$20 premium on oil prices if Russia invades Ukraine.
Although Ukraine produces some oil and natural gas, the primary concerns of a Russian invasion are 1). Ukraine is an important transit location for oil and gas; and 2). Russian sanctions would be put in place, potentially reducing the available oil supply in a tight market. If Russia could still sell all the oil it could produce to countries that refuse to abide by the sanctions, it might do well financially with an oil price spike.
But that leads to the question of how sanctions on Russia might impact the U.S. market. As of late 2021, the U.S. was importing 8.5 million BPD of crude oil from all countries (Source). Canada was our top supplier, sending the U.S. 4.5 million BPD. (Having secure oil supplies from close allies highlights why the Keystone XL Pipeline expansion was important). Mexico was second, at 700,000 BPD, and then Russia at 595,000 BPD. Saudi Arabia was our 4th largest supplier at 555,000 BPD.
The math says that is $950,000,000 per day for Russia. As Putin says, “Fuck you!” And the DEVESTATING AND PROFOUND SANNCTIONS allow Putin and Russia to remain in the SWIFT system.
Again, no expert here, but Harold Ford Jr said that SWIFT is like Venmo for natural gas. The sanctions have also not been directed against Putin directly. So the experts beard-scratch and hypothesize about why and how did they not see the invasion? How does one remain an “expert” by being consistently wrong?
If friction is the mortal enemy of movement and acceptance of human loss is a bargaining chip, are we surprised by Putin’s actions? Seems like a ton of experts are now saying, hmmm, we didn’t really, really expect him to invade.
Seems like the US is more worried about pissing off Germany then helping Ukraine. I mean, the DEVESTATING AND PROFOUND SANCTIONS were so draconian to the Russian economy that their announcement rescued the US stock market from a 10% bottom drop out.
The US is legally treaty bound to militarily defend any NATO country that is attacked. There are 30 of them. No wonder they can’t make a fucking decision to even condemn a war.
A cyberattack is a form of warfare. Or is it just a minor incursion? I predict we are about to discover the horrifying answer to that question.
How many human beings walking around today will be dead tomorrow? How many memories will be faded in years to come? How many dreams die for this cause? Haw fast can the killing fields be filled up again?
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Below is the original post scheduled for today. It is mostly finished. I tried, but that thought-train went off the tracks fast. Just like all of the bad news that was eating up the President. Doesn’t that old political-hack saying include the phrase, … ”by showing strength abroad.” Well, at least we’re not worried by those Freedom Loving Truckers anymore.
By the way, are the Ukrainians Freedom Loving People too? Hmmm
Thanks for reading.
As always, your support makes this possible. If your lot in life has blessed you with a few extra dollars burning a hole in your pocket, I know the perfect cause to throw all that money behind.
Ric
Edge of Tomorrow
What if you had the ability to die and start that day all over again? Edge of Tomorrow explores that gift. Or curse, depending on which street corner you're standing on. In the context of War and Authority, the natural right of man to the expression of opposition, or even mild disagreement, is subsumed by “Existential Threat”.
I’m not sure why that movie triggered a wave of existentialism that swept over me. So much so, its warm, smothering embrace lovingly strangled all rational thought out of me. It let me snuggle comfortably with darkness right out in broad daylight.
WHAT DOES EXISTENTIAL THREAT MEAN?
An existential threat is a threat to something’s very existence—when the continued being of something is at stake or in danger. It is used to describe threats to actual living things as well to nonliving things, such as a country or an ideology.
John Paul Satre introduced me to Existentialism, the categorical definition of which is still being debated by literary geeks. Either it’s a tired cliched Woody Allen oozing repressed obsessions or a neo-gothic Nietzsche neuroticizing pleasurable pain.
“Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be its “heart” (Kaufmann 1968: 12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on—find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing norm.
Who is Jean-Paul Sartre? is a breezy bio that gives one a sense of the man while still obscuring his greatness. After all, he wrote words such as this
Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority.
Existence precedes transformation of consciousness.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
I found a quick bio on IMDb of Sartre. I was introduced to Sartre during my seminal semester of scholarly studies at Saddleback Community College. Actually, my first and only college semester. Intro to Lit 101 Phraseology: Ego-Stroking.
the freemasonry of the urinal
Given my Gen-X existence and the circumstances of my youth heretofore described in posts past, Sartre became a patron saint of mine that year. Only his bleakness outweighed mine. The reading assignment was The Age of Reason, the first of a trilogy of fiction novels set in pre-WWII France.
Check this out for a dissenting opinion. I was almost hurt by the negative review. That was a weird hurt! Here is another review that made me chuckle. Then frown.
"The Age of Reason frequently attempts to shock the reader with pointless vulgarity (...). Existentialists may deny that such scenes are introduced for sensationalism's sake, but they have not explained why it is necessary to expound their doctrine solely from a worm's eye view of life. What one of the characters calls "the freemasonry of the urinal" will seem, to many readers, an accurate description of Sartre's own books."
Time
I was struck by the suddenness of it popping into my head. It was on the bookshelf in my bedroom. The one I read as an 20-year-old almost 40 years ago. It has my underlines and notes in it. My nomadic lifestyle and recent purging of material trappings underscore the delicious irony of finding this treasure amongst the flotsam and jetsam in the turbulent wake of the past.
So down the fabbit-ho I go. Again. (fabbit-ho=fabulous rabbit hole). Reading the book again 40 years later. With Europe on the brink of war again. Most reactionaries screaming WWIII. Most Ukrainians going out for dinner and a drink. Just like they did in Poland and France in the late 1930s, I imagine.
Truth, like everything, is elusively, exclusively explicit. And like everything else today, “Existential Threat” squeezes the truth so it distorts and shapeshifts into the exact sort of truth desired by Authority. The coining of new terms to describe the non-truth truth, like misinformation, and disinformation and malinformation, is nothing more than a mental crowbar to rip the reality before our eyes into their focus.
How long before the crowbar morphs from psychologically metaphorical into physically lethal? Not long, as our peaceful brethren in the Great White North just confirmed. And remember all of those protests against police violence against unarmed protestors?
Any of those people protesting the abuse by police of the peaceful truckers protestors? Why is that? Unacceptable Views. That’s why. When the reality before one’s eyes is discounted and called unreality, over time the message sinks in.
One Stars and Bars flag in Canada is spotted and becomes a major storyline. My first reaction was, “What psycho Canadian is flying the Confederate Flag?”
Then I started thinking about my own family and our French-Canadian roots. I wonder what side my great-grand-uncle Theophile Waelbrock would come down on? He was a truck-driver in his youth. He didn’t make it past that. He died a week after a fiery crash. Driving a truck. He was 18.
I think it’s historically important to get a sense of America’s sentiment about French-Canadians at the start of the 19th century. It wasn’t positive, to be sure.
I just visited his gravesite the other day. I write about Theophile and my French-Canadian family, and the extreme “Othering” of an entire group of immigrants in an excerpt from the book I am working on:
At the end of the 19th century both sets of my maternal forebearers prepared to leave their home country behind to capture the American dream. However, the sentiment of the American nation was against one set and for the other.
In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of The United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. “manufacturing New England, puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,” she wrote.
Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in “Little Canadas” of “hastily-constructed tenements,” in houses holding from three to 50 families, subsisting in conditions that were “a reproach to civilization,” while “inspiring fear and aversion in neighbors.”
So, pretty much one-quarter of my culture despised another 25%. Just wait until the Protestants shook my biological father’s family tree, full of alcoholic Eastern-Europeans!
More from local New England newspapers at the time,
Conditions in the tenements, wrote Tenney, “show a degree of brutality almost inconceivable in a civilized community. … a sight even to make a Christian swear.”
Brunswick was not the only mill town with poor living conditions. Journalist William Bayard Hale visited Little Canada in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1894. “it would be an abuse to house a dog in such a place,” Hale wrote. Some Fall River tenements, continued Hale, “do not compare favorably with old-time slave-quarters,” a not-so-distant memory in the 1890s.
The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … they care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”
Quebec society was changing dramatically in the late 1940s and ’50s. Montreal and other urban centres grew rapidly after the war, and a burgeoning French-speaking urban middle class was entering business and other white-collar professions. Increasing numbers of students completed high school and entered Canadian colleges and universities. A prolonged and bitter strike by asbestos workers began a period of labour conflict and gave young idealists—one of them Pierre Trudeau, future prime minister of Canada—a chance to combine with labour in a struggle for a free society of balanced interests. A new Quebec was emerging, despite Duplessis’s best efforts to keep it Catholic, agrarian, and conservative. At the time of his death in 1959, the province was ready for major political changes. (Bold is mine)
I’m wondering if the younger Trudeau has any self-awareness of his father’s “Unacceptable Views” as a young idealist? The above paragraph comes from a vexillologist perspective. It’s actually an interesting read too! Who knew after that thing Sheldon did?
The Age of Reason last page, underlined by 20 year Ric, circa 1984
Thanks for putting together this information in one article. I've been reading many separate ones. It's good to see it all in one place.
I've noted it before: we are financing Putin's war efforts.