Bud Houston's Blog

ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis will moderate the Presidential Debate from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. It should go something like this…

Donald Trump responds to the question first. It’ll go something like this…

We expect something a bit more focused on the original question from Kamala Harris. It might go something like this…

Expect Balanced Coverage the Morning After the Debate

Slightly right-wing news sources will give their own unique spin on the debate. There job, after all, is to tell Trump supporters what to think.

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I have a couple of blogs I would like to write. But since I’ve been away from my blog for so long I owe a discussion of my health adventures. I assume that you’d like to know what condition my condition is in.

It appears my cancer is in remission. I’ve likely bought a couple more years.

Not to be a complete drama queen about this thing; I want to back up and talk about what a near thing this was. If you’d like to skip the gory details I understand and don’t care. Skip on down to the Big Lebowski video and happy holidays to ya.

Gory Details

I spent a month in the hospital, half of that in ICU and the other in oncology daily care. I decided that I had come to an end. ultimately tired of the ignominious uncomfortable embarrassing undignified crappy life I was living… I gave up. I started refusing care and basically told them I was done with it, and to let me die in peace. I changed my status to DNR.

My oncologist, a doctor name of Cawley, is widely regarded as a saint in this part of the world. All of Dr. Cawley’s associates regard her with respect, admiration and awe. She’s the sort of doctor you’d want if you need an oncologist.

Anyhow, she used an impressive campaign of child psychology to bring me back to accepting treatment. The Keytruda infusions I had received had crushed the cancer in my lungs. But then the Keytruda attacked my lungs. It is that infection that my treatment is now designed to cure.

There was in front of me a narrow window of opportunity and hope. I privately compare it to the scene in the opening of the Matrix where Trinity is running from an Agent and the police across a rooftop and escapes by jumping off the building and diving through a very small window in another nearby building.

That is the leap I’m taking now. It is going swimmingly. My health improves daily. And I have advanced to acting very retired and wasting far too much time on streaming movies and playing World of Warcraft.

Liberating

There is something liberating about resigning yourself to being dead… then discovering you aren’t dead at all.

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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.

I’ve been doing some straightening in the basement. And I’ve stumbled across a couple things worth sharing. These will be of interest to my dog agility friends.

This was my boy Bogie’s MACH bar circa 2001. Now, back in the day they didn’t give out MACH bars. So the practice was, among some of us, to snatch away the actual very last bar your dog jumped as he earned the Championship title.

This was at a club up in Pennsylvania. I remember that the equipment manager was pretty pissed at me for making off with his equipment.

It’s fun looking at some of the names on the bar and knowing who was there on that day.

After I got the MACH I pretty much stopped trialing Bogie in the AKC. I did the same thing with the USDAA, when Bogie got his ADCh. I preferred instead to play league play at my own training center. I’ve never been the kind of exhibitor that the agility organizations really love.

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I also found this polo shirt in a box downstairs. As I’ve lost a lot of weight recently (about 45 lbs); I find myself fitting in clothing that I haven’t worn for a long time.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember where the 2006 Petit Prix was held. My memory isn’t cooperating.

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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.

Funny how one thing gets you thinking about another thing. Sometimes it’s hard to trace back through how your thoughts trip over each other on a common thread that might not be easy to unravel. How did I get here from there?

Take this as fair warning, don’t expect the writing below to summarize as some kind of cogent essay. It’s just rambling, following the connecting threads.

Kerouac

On rereading On the Road I’m provoked to consider the color and character that America has lost in the homogenization of our culture. I expect to write about that one day soon. But forgetting that provocation I’m captivated by Jack’s prose. Consider this salvo:

“The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

I am agog.

The protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were beat generation. They softly spoke the language of the so-called beatnik. It wasn’t a cartoon-like speech like Maynard Krebs (Bob Denver / Dobie Gillis). I see them like the young people of any generation, consumed with the daily task of making a life and a living, partying at the least provocation, while soulfully searching for love and fulfillment of lust.

The portrait of America at a point in time is an abiding character of the novel: places and roads and modes of travel, how people dressed according to fashion and practicality, the discovered foods, places where people slept and ate and worked, where they drank and danced, and the music that colored their lives. And every place was unique in all those ways.

Aside from country music, and soulful Mexican serenades, the Bop was mentioned more than a few times. I had to research it a bit. This was a sound and a dance that came into vogue in the early 50’s and was apparently the sound and dance of that generation.

Aunt L’Marie

A compelling family legend has my aunt L’Marie winning a Bop dancing contest in Brinkley, Arkansas. And before you dismiss this as a minor contest in a hick country town you should know that kids from all over that part of Arkansas traveled there to dance, which would include Wheatly, DeValls Bluff, and even kids from as far away as Clarendon. It was a big deal, you see.

It was L’Marie’s 15 minutes of fame.

Pleasanton

In the early 80’s I lived down in Pleasanton, Texas and commuted every day all the way up to San Antonio.

My next-door neighbors, by the way, were Ben and Mona Parker, who were quite famous and revered in the area, though I was too self-absorbed in my own life to recognize it at the time. Mona was the engineer who built KBOP AM radio transmitter.

I’m fascinated by the BOP part of the call name. I can’t help but believe that it was literally named after the favored young peoples’ dance of the era.

Along about 1983 Robert Johnson Advertising—where I worked—up in San Antonio got a contract to promote a Willie Nelson benefit concert down in Pleasanton to finance the launch of the Mona Parker’s Longhorn Museum.

Turns out that Willie Nelson worked for Ben and Mona at KBOP in the early days of the station. People in the area remembered Willie as a short-haired skinny young cowboy that wore a white suit and had a live KBOP program on which he played his acoustic guitar and sang country melodies. That’s the way the story was told to me.

https://www.waymarking.com/gallery/image.aspx?f=1&guid=8becaa17-b4c6-4cd1-b07a-3a0c4c007496

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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.

In my youth, circa 1972, I took a trip to Arkansas to visit my brother who lived in a little town name of Hunters Mill. I applied for a job as an assembler over in Forest City and was hired. But I never quite made it to my first day of work.

My cousin Billie Joe and I took up a trip on a Friday night down to a dance club in Hazen with a mind to dance, drink a few beers, and maybe get lucky. On our way out of the club a police car followed us out, pulling us over before we could get on the Interstate. Having Arizona tags on the car was a red flag.

I was arrested for intoxicated driving. I’d had four beers, after all. And I was sentenced to serve six months in the Phillips County Penal farm, down by Helena.

I spent the next couple of months doing the work of the farm, which was building a bridge [impressive engineering complete with a pile driver that moved forward on the bridge as it was being built], chopping cotton, picking okra, and clearing right of way.

My mother, who had been vacationing down in Monterrey Mexico got wind of where I was when she got home to Tucson. She contacted the judge over in Hazen and made arrangements to pay off my fine. Whereupon I was released. Mom was born and raised in Arkansas and understood completely how that world worked.

I could write an entertaining short biography of that time; but that’ll have to wait. There’s another point I want to make here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_County_Penal_Farm_Historic_District

Slavery is an economic system.

The 13th Amendment makes it unconstitution for a person to be held as a slave, with this important exception: “Except as a punishment for crime.”

After the Civil War the south with it’s shattered slave labor economy worked to recover economic viability by exploiting the “punishishment for crime” exception to the 13th Amendment. They targeted black people who were easy to demonize and were in ready abundance. Laws were enacted to make things like loitering, trespassing and vagrancy criminal offenses.

In 1972 there were roughly 350,000 convicts in American prisons.

Capitalism and Slavery

I cringe every time I hear a politician declare unwavering endorsement of the capitalist system! That system depends on the institution of slavery.

A prosperous capitalist system will thrive and grow. Today there are roughly 1,500,000 convicts in American prisons. These convicts work in conditions of slavery. We have 6% of the world’s population but 25% of incarcerated people.

Prison industries need cheap labor. Big corporations and billionaire funded think tanks (like ALEC) have played “ghost writer” to Republican legislation for more than 40 years; legislation geared to keep up prison populations to meet the production quotas of those prison industries.

Black people remain the primary target of criminal legislation to ensure a prison industries work force. Remember these bits from the American dialog: Habitual criminal; stop and frisk; mandatory sentencing; truth in sentencing; super predator; black music is criminal; drugs black people are more severely punished.

A Deferred Prosecution Agreement allows a judge to let a criminal escape punishment if he feels the person will likely forego a life of crime. A black person is 18 times less likely than a white person to be liberated by DPA.

A Premeditated Crime

The demonization of black people as human beings is objectively the same narrative as portrayed in “Birth of a Nation”.

To look beyond the racist viewpoint: a horrible crime has been perpetrated against more than a million Americans. Slavery is a crime against humanity. The capitalist system in cahoots with the legal system have made this crime an ongoing American nightmare.

Accessory to the Crime: The Federalists

The Federalist subscribes to the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the sensibilities and beliefs of the founding fathers, as set forth in the Federalist Papers.

That’s all a bunch of happy horse-shit.

Our “founding fathers” were for the most part slave owners. And they wrote into the Constitution specific protections for the ruling class. Make no mistake about it, when politicians or jurists proclaim themselves to be “Federalist”, they are confessing to their support for the ruling class: Rich White Men; and for the modern institution of slavery.

Accessory to the Crime: The Supreme Court

Citizens United tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations; enabling donors to buy elections, bribe politicians, and lavish gifts and money on Supreme Court justices. The law allows the donors identities to be kept secret.

The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act, weakening the federal government ability to block discriminatory voting laws. The court ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.

The Superball Bonus

An added bonus to the modern American slavery scheme is that a person convicted of a felony is apt to lose civil rights for life, depending on state laws. That would include the right to vote. Somewhere I saw a statistic that 1/3 of black men in Alabama are unable to vote, having been convicted of a crime.

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Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.