TBR News December 1, 2019
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 1, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for December 1: “There is American Hero, Donald Trump pardoning convicted American war criminals and smirking like a fat boy who just stole a pumpkin pie from a crippled aunt. Donny dodged the draft during the Vietnam war but soon enough, he will be telling his pin-head supporters that he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for wiping out a whole Chinese regiment with his toothbrush. He had someone graft a copy of his head, wig and all, onto a picture of some weightlifter and saw to it that it was published. To say that there is something seriously wrong with Trump is a misstatement. He is a back-wards beauty without question and it would not surprise me if he got up in front of a dim-wit audience wearing only the top half of a clown suit and playing a banjo.”
The Table of Contents
• Trump’s military meddling fuels growing tension with leadership
• Trump made up injury to dodge Vietnam service, his former lawyer testifies
• Amazon under fire over Auschwitz ‘Christmas ornaments’
• Official Record of all Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp from May of 1940 through December of 1944.
• Turning blood into gold: Gitta Sereny, fiction writer
• The Season of Evil
Trump’s military meddling fuels growing tension with leadership
Amid strategic U-turns and elevation of war crimes defendants, president’s military support weakens – but Fox pundits back him
December 1, 2019
by Julian Borger in Washington
The Gurdian
On Thursday night, a besuited Donald Trump appeared at a US airbase in Afghanistan, serving Thanksgiving turkey to the troops, complaining half-jokingly about the length of his surprise trip, and drawing attention to all the money he had spent on the military.
“You’ll come back,” the president told soldiers at the Bagram base – a remark interpreted by the reporters covering the event as a reference to the quality of the food he was giving them, rather than warning of further tours of duty in a war that is already 18 years old.
Trump left Afghanistan three and half hours after he arrived and flew back to his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago, leaving behind conflicting clues about his intentions. He restated his frequent promise that he would bring the troops home, but also insisted: “We don’t play for ties,” adding: “We’re going to stay until such time as we have a deal or we have total victory.”
Distributing hot dinners to soldiers is a standard requisite for being commander-in-chief, though it is one that Trump has largely managed to avoid. After nearly three years in office, it was his first visit to Afghanistan and only his second trip in the vicinity of a war zone. But with the presidential election now less than a year away, and the grey cloud of impeachment hanging over the White House, he is cloaking himself as tightly as he can in khaki.
Over the past few months, Trump has embraced his role as commander-in-chief, announcing unheralded military movements in and out of Syria and intervening repeatedly in the military justice system to absolve service soldiers accused of war crimes.
The US military – or its leadership at least – is hardly reveling in the president’s attention. A spate of reports cite former commanders and unnamed active duty senior officers complaining about the undermining of the chain of command and the corrosion of the integrity of an institution most Americans have seen as a pillar of the republic – an incorruptible and disciplined armed forces.
CNN reported “at least two senior military officers” had been reluctant to appear alongside Trump at recent official events, out of fear of he would come out with partisan remarks.
Richard Spencer, the secretary of the navy fired last week after clashing with the president over war crimes cases, wrote in the Washington Post that it was “a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices”.
It is a far cry from the early days of Trump’s presidency, when he surrounded himself with military brass and boasted about “his generals”. One by one those grand martial figures have left the administration, to be lampooned by their commander-in-chief on their way out the door as “failed generals” who were “not tough enough” and “overrated”. More senior officers are reported to be considering resignation, if the president continues to meddle in what they see as the preserve of the military.
But Trump is unlikely to stop.
The president has held up war crimes defendants as “warriors”, betrayed by their politically correct superiors. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” he complained in a tweet.
“That represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the American warrior ethic,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a retired air force lieutenant colonel and a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. “A true warrior is one who who exercises restraint and it requires moral courage to exercise restraint.”
But Trump’s ideal is encouraged by the pundits he watches on Fox News. He has granted pardons in similar cases earlier in the year, and he clearly believes it fires up his base. The Daily Beast reported he was planning to hit the campaign trail with the three soldiers he recently absolved of war crimes charges.
The trio includes the former army lieutenant Clint Lorance, sentenced to 19 years in prison for murder after ordering his men to open fire on three unarmed Afghan men riding past on a motorcycle, killing two of them. And the Green Beret major Matthew Goldsteyn, who was facing murder charges after admitting to CIA interviewers that he had killed an unarmed detainee, a suspected bomb-maker, and burned the corpse while serving in Afghanistan in 2010. Trump pardoned both two weeks ago.
He also intervened repeatedly in the case of the Navy Seal chief Edward Gallagher, who had been acquitted of the murder of an unarmed detainee, but demoted after being found guilty of posing for a “trophy” photograph with the corpse.
Trump went on Twitter to insist Gallagher keep his trident pin, the celebrated badge of the elite unit, in defiance of a Navy Seal review board.
The defendant’s lawyers had found a way of working around the military justice system by getting their cases a sympathetic hearing on Fox, knowing it has an avid viewer in the White House.
Their cases were championed in particular by Pete Hegseth, a weekend chat show host on Fox & Friends who is a former reserve military officer, with a dedicated following in the ranks of the armed forces.
Hegseth has been scathing over the senior officers who criticize Trump.
Gallagher appeared on Hegseth’s show last Sunday, and shocked the military hierarchy by trashing his superiors while still on active duty. He accused Spencer of meddling and the navy special war commander of insubordination for resisting Trump’s interference in military justice.
“There will be subset of the military who will see this as his way of taking on the system, and protecting this guy,” said Katrina Mulligan, who served in the Obama administration’s national security council and justice department and is now managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.
“Most people in the military and other national security institutions will find it deeply upsetting. You don’t grow up in military service without a healthy respect for the way military justice operates,” she added.
The war crimes meddling is just one point of friction between the commander-in-chief and the military.
Trump – who never served in the military, and avoided Vietnam by claiming to have “bone spurs” – has claimed greater expertise that his commanders, and has fired off orders on Twitter with little or no consultation. In early October, he ordered all US troops out of Syria, having been persuaded to take that course of action by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, only to command his forces back in little more than two weeks later, to “secure the oil”.
He diverted nearly $13bn in military construction projects and thousands of troops to help build his long-promised wall on the southern border. He abruptly cut off year-long negotiations with the Taliban in September, but declared them back on during his Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan. There was no apparent shift in underlying circumstances in either case.
Trump is fond of talking about “my military”, but the claim is less true with every passing month. Veterans still support him in significantly greater numbers than the general population, but he no longer has a lead among active duty service members, who are fairly evenly split between approval and disapproval.
The damage done to the fabric of the military, by the divisions and uncertainty stirred up by the commander-in-chief, is harder to calculate.
“By intervening, Trump is creating circumstances where the men and women in uniform are being asked to take sides between the superior officers and the president,” Mulligan said. “It makes you wonder: is nothing sacred? Sadly, the answer is no.”
“Most people in the military and other national security institutions will find it deeply upsetting. You don’t grow up in military service without a healthy respect for the way military justice operates,” she added.
The war crimes meddling is just one point of friction between the commander-in-chief and the military.
Trump – who never served in the military, and avoided Vietnam by claiming to have “bone spurs” – has claimed greater expertise that his commanders, and has fired off orders on Twitter with little or no consultation. In early October, he ordered all US troops out of Syria, having been persuaded to take that course of action by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, only to command his forces back in little more than two weeks later, to “secure the oil”.
He diverted nearly $13bn in military construction projects and thousands of troops to help build his long-promised wall on the southern border. He abruptly cut off year-long negotiations with the Taliban in September, but declared them back on during his Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan. There was no apparent shift in underlying circumstances in either case.
Trump is fond of talking about “my military”, but the claim is less true with every passing month. Veterans still support him in significantly greater numbers than the general population, but he no longer has a lead among active duty service members, who are fairly evenly split between approval and disapproval.
The damage done to the fabric of the military, by the divisions and uncertainty stirred up by the commander-in-chief, is harder to calculate.
“By intervening, Trump is creating circumstances where the men and women in uniform are being asked to take sides between the superior officers and the president,” Mulligan said. “It makes you wonder: is nothing sacred? Sadly, the answer is no.”
Trump made up injury to dodge Vietnam service, his former lawyer testifies
by Leo Shane III
Military Times
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump acknowledged to advisors that he made up a fake injury to avoid military service, because “I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” his former lawyer told lawmakers during testimony on Wednesday.
Michael Cohen, who also worked as a fixer for Trump before his election, said he was tasked with tamping down criticism of the military deferment as the presidential candidate simultaneously mocked Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, for being regarded as a military hero. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said during a July 2015 interview.
“Mr. Trump claimed (his medical deferment) was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery,” Cohen told members of the House Oversight Committee. “He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment.
“He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”
Trump has downplayed his relationship with Cohen and claimed he is fabricating stories about their work together in order to negotiate a deal with federal prosecutors for a lesser sentence on a host of unrelated crimes.
But Cohen said he worked closely with the New York businessman for nine years leading up to the 2016 election, and helped him cover up a host of embarrassing and potentially illegal activities.
“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience,” he told the committee. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”
The lack of information surrounding Trump’s Vietnam war deferments has been a point of criticism since the campaign, but White House officials have dismissed those concerns as politically motivated.
Trump received five deferments during the height of the Vietnam War. Four were for education. The fifth was the medical waiver, after his graduation.
“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” Cohen said. “He had no desire or intention to lead this nation, only to market himself and to build his wealth and power.”
Committee chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., called Cohen’s allegations “disturbing” and said they will help inform the panel’s work to decide if the commander-in-chief committed potentially impeachable acts either before or after the election.
Amazon under fire over Auschwitz ‘Christmas ornaments’
The Auschwitz Memorial has criticized a shop on Amazon for selling Christmas ornaments with images of the Nazi concentration camp. The memorial urged the online store to remove the “disrespectful” items.
December 1, 2019
by Rebecca Staudenmaier
DW
A shop on Amazon has come under fire for selling Christmas tree ornaments and other products featuring pictures of the Auschwitz concentration camp .
In a post on Twitter, the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum flagged at least four items being sold on Amazon with pictures of the camp on them — including ornaments in the shape of a bell and a six-pointed star, as well as bottle openers.
“Auschwitz on a bottle opener is rather disturbing and disrespectful,” the museum wrote Sunday. It urged the online retail giant to remove the items.
The shop describes the items as “travel souvenirs,” and sells them alongside other ornaments and items decorated with images of cities and monuments from around the world.
Hundreds of Twitter users have voiced outrage over the products, with some also including screenshots of other heart-shaped ornaments and keychains with pictures of the Nazi German death camp currently being sold on Amazon.
Many said they had raised the issue with Amazon customer support. DW has also reached out to Amazon for comment and will update if they respond.
Amazon faced backlash earlier this year for selling rugs and shoes with images of Hindu gods on them, prompting thousands of social media users in India to call for a boycott of the shopping site.
Raising awareness online
The Auschwitz Museum regularly uses its social media accounts to raise awareness about the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II and to remember the victims of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi death camp, where 1.1 million victims, including some 1 million Jewish prisoners, were killed.
The museum has also used social media to point out bad behavior by visitors at the memorial, including visitors who posed for pictures on the train tracks at the camp.
Official Record of all Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp from May of 1940 through December of 1944.
The Official Records
Prisoner records of Auschwitz camp from May, 1940 through December 1944 from the Glücks complete Concentration Camp microfilm records now located in the Russian Central Archives
(Note: The attached statistical tables concerning prisoners in Auschwitz camp from its inception to its closing are taken directly from Soviet archival material, now available on microfilm from the former Soviet Central Archives. Also, a good deal of corroborative material from the German Archives concerning the German State Railways has been located in the German State Archives (Bundesarchiv) and utilized. The railroad was responsible for the transportation of inmates to and from concentration camps in the figures from the Russian files is accurately reflected in the Reichsbahn documents.)
Total non-Jews in Auschwitz, 1940-1944: 161,685
Total Jews in Auschwitz, 1941-1944: 173,000
Total number of inmates in Auschwitz, 1940-1944
334,785
Total Jewish deaths by typhus in Auschwitz, 1942-1944
58,240
Total non-Jewish deaths by typhus in Auschwitz, 1940-1944
45,207
Death by natural causes (other than typhus), 1940-1944
4,140
Total Jewish deaths by natural causes (other than typhus), 1941-1944
2,064
Total transferred from Auschwitz, 1940-1944
121,453
Administrative Executions at Auschwitz, 1940-1943
Total number of inmates executed: 1359
Total Poles executed: 1208
Total Jews executed: 117
Total Russians executed: 19
Total Gypsies executed: 19
Total Czechs executed: 6
Total of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, May, 1944-October,1944
Total number of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, May-October, 1944: 23,117
Note: Number of Hungarian Jews claimed sent to Auschwitz, May-October, 1944:
Lucy Dawidowicz. The War Against the Jews, New York, 1975: 450,000
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, New York, 1985. 180,000
Total number of Hungarian Jews entering Auschwitz, May-October, 1944:
23,117
Total number of Hungarian Jews transferred from Auschwitz, May-October, 1944:
21,527
Total number of Hungarian Jews remaining in Auschwitz after October, 1944:
1,590
• Summation: From July, 1941 through October 1944
• Total number of Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz camp system: 173,000
• Total number of Jewish prisoners who died of typhus: 58,240
• Total number of Jewish prisoners who died of natural causes: 2,064
• Total number of Jewish prisoners transferred to other camps: 100,743
• Total number of Jewish prisoners executed: 117
• Total number of Jewish prisoners remaining in camp after German evacuation in January, 1945: 11,839
When the SS evacuated the Auschwitz work camp complex at the end of December 1944, they left a large number of prisoners behind. Many of these were too old or too sick to travel and they were left in their barracks, guarded by a Polish militia that had been raised earlier by Hans Frank, the head of the Government General (as occupied Poland was termed by the Germans.) With the approach of the Soviet army in early 1945, these Polish guards indiscriminately attacked the barracks with the prisoners inside, using hand grenades and machine guns.
The violent animosity of the Catholic Poles to their huge Jewish community is certainly well known. When the Russians invaded Poland in 1920, one of the greatest fears of the Polish leadership and the government was that the 500,000 Jewish residents of Warsaw’s Nalevski district would rise up against them in support of the advancing Bolshevik armies. Many Polish Jews fled after the failure of the Russian attack and a number of those left behind were promptly massacred by Poles when the central government collapsed after the German invasion of 1939.
Although exact figures of the dead among the remaining inmates are not available, several existing Soviet military reports put the death toll between 7,000 and 10,000. Former members of the Polish militia have subsequently claimed that many of the dead were shot down by Russian troops as they attempted to exit the liberated camp.
The Russians did not like Jews either, remembering their savagery against them during the salad days of Josef Stalin.
The truth of this matter will never be known but at least this is an atrocity that cannot be blamed on the Germans who were hundreds of miles away at the time.
How many of the 1,590 Hungarian Jewish deportees remaining in Auschwitz died in this Slavic holocaust is not known.
Turning blood into gold: Gitta Sereny, fiction writer
December 1, 2019
The temptation to embroider historical facts to fit a particular ideological point of view is difficult for some journalists to successfully resist. Some might well accept a faked Goebbels file, if for example, it were to prove that Hitler did not order a holocaustic killing of European Jews, while others might well use the medium of a questionable interview to prove the contrary.
A classic example of this latter case is to be found in a work by Hungarian-American author, Gitta Sereny. It first appeared in 1974 and was entitled Into That Darkness. This work purports to be based on an interview with Franz Stangl, an SS officer who ran a camp in occupied Poland during the war where many prisoners were later stated to have been gassed. The book contains a lengthy section quoting Stangl, who according to Sereny’s version, fully admits his part in the purported killings and asks for forgiveness from God and his victims. The balance of the work consists of various supplementary testimonies from former associates and family members, all attesting to the evil nature of Stangl’s activities and all clearly acknowledging his willing cooperation in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
Sereny, it should be noted, made a comfortable living writing books and articles dealing with holocaust killings. But this particular book shows with great clarity the pitfalls that occur when a journalist, as opposed to a legitimate academic historian, produces a work which is not only entirely anecdotal in content, but ideological in thrust. There is no documentation, whatsoever, in this work which relies almost entirely on the author’s purported interviews with various people. Stangl died on the day following Sereny’s visit to him in prison where he was appealing his life sentence.
Herein lies the key to the questionability of the entire book. Stangl had been sentenced to a life term in prison as the result of his easily-foreseen conviction as a camp commander. He, through his attorneys, was appealing this sentence. It is highly doubtful if either Stangl or his attorneys would permit such a damaging interview to take place and to permit Sereny, whose extremist views were well known, free and unfettered access to the prisoner.
There would appear to be no question that Sereny and her photographer husband, Don Honeyman, did indeed visit the prison and did see Stangl. Sereny’s husband took several photographs of him, photographs which are extensively reproduced in the book. The published pictures, however, do not support statements alleged to have been made by the former Austrian SS officer, but merely prove that he permitted himself to be photographed by his visitors. By making such incriminating statements as Sereny placed, post mortem, in his mouth, Stangl would have irrevocably destroyed any chance he might have had in his pending appeal before the German courts.
It is beyond reasonable belief that such statements were made under the circumstances indicated. A dead Stangl, however, could comfortably be alleged to have made any statement that the author chose to put into his mouth, and without the possible embarrassment to her or her publisher of an instant denial or possible legal proceedings.
A careful reading of the book not only disclosed the author’s prejudice towards Stangl and the system he served, but also is entirely devoid of any facts to support her thesis. She notes that a number of witnesses died before the book was published, of course including her main source, Stangl. Much of the anecdotal material Sereny has put together to support her case is of such a nature as to preclude its ever being introduced in a court of law. Several examples are set forth as illustration.
In one, Sereny claims that Stangl’s wife wrote her a letter following an interview Sereny had with the wife in Brazil. In this letter, which is not reproduced, Frau Stangl allegedly states that in 1945 she was interviewed by two members of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence agency, and that they knew of her husband’s whereabouts in an American jail. “I examined their papers,” she is quoted as writing, “I have no doubt whatever that they were genuine.” The flaw in this scenario is obvious. It is simply not believable that the wife of an obscure SS officer would have the slightest idea what “genuine” U.S. CIC identification papers looked like. But Sereny states that the woman would have no reason to invent the incident. Perhaps the invention did not originate with Stangl’s wife, but with the author herself.
At another point, Sereny introduced “Franciszek Zabecki” who she alleges was a Polish railroad worker, stationed in the vicinity of the Concentration Camp at Treblinka in German-occupied Poland. Sereny has this man counting all the trains carrying prisoners to the camp, standing outside in all kinds of weather and at all hours for a period of two full years. From his unrecorded and highly questionable comments, “Zabecki” states categorically that 1.2 million persons were killed in Treblinka during that time.
It is anecdotal and imaginative material, at charitable best, that suffuses and supports the entire untenable structure of this work. Unfortunately, a large proportion of what purports to be important historical studies are based either on entirely faked documents or on the wishful thinking of mendacious and ideological journalists.
Generations must pass before the fictive is eventually weeded out from the factual, and in the meantime an appellation which has been applied to the Sereny book, Dialogs with the Dead, could well be applied to other mendacious creative writing essays herein studied.
The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas
Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.
Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019
Chapter 14
Because of the shambles in the streets, it was shortly after noon the next day when the last car blocking the road had been towed off and the pair checked out of the motel and drove back to Santa Clara again.
This time, when they passed the sign about a frugal Jesus, Eric laughed.
The city of Santa Cruz had taken five years to recover from a major earthquake but it never completely recovered from what was later called “The Great Fourth Fire.”
As no one had any idea how it started, a number of television documentary producers subsequently concocted various improbable scenarios to account for the disaster.
A born-again Christian production firm created the story that a peyote-crazed member of a Satanic cult had set a cat on fire as part of some obscure ritual and in its death agonies, it had run under the boardwalk to die while still blazing like a Yule log.
It was their thesis that the cult members planned to abolish Christianity and replace it with a form of celestial Bingo.
A number of aged or otherwise mentally infirm witnesses were found who, for ten dollars each, were willing to claim, on camera of course, that they had actually seen the flaming cat as well as the cult member dressed in a red cloak and wearing a black jock strap with steel studs spelling out the name of a well-known secular/humanist politician.
Another producer, who was Jewish, produced an epic that blamed the entire business on a hidden but very large movement of neo-Nazis who were attempting to establish the Fourth Reich in America, abolish school lunches and turn Arizona into a gigantic concentration camp, complete with a soap factory and a lampshade concern. They were waiting on the beach for the appearance of an ancient German submarine carrying the mummified corpse of Adolf Hitler.
The blazing concessions were a signal to the U-boat to land a brigade of SS men dressed like Iowa farm wives and all armed with razor sharp garden implements and copies of Mein Kampf in Spanish, California’s new first language.
This version immediately received effusive accolades in the national press for the unquestioned brilliance of its concept and the perfection of its production, but was actually watched by far fewer people than had seen the Bingo Master version. The general public was far more interested in owning large television sets than in actually watching their flickering imagery and had long ago grown bored with the endlessly repeated soft soap legend.
The truth is not in most people and certainly not in documentary producers.
The television set in one of the apartment’s bedrooms was showing endless clips of the Santa Cruz inferno while Chuck sat cross-legged on his bed, snipping his toenails.
Beside him on the bed were large, neat piles of money, a notebook, a pen and a pocket calculator.
Some fortunate cameraman caught the last act of the aged roller coaster and it played over and over again with zoom-ins to the area where the cars had landed.
Chuck thought it looked like someone had dropped a cherry pie on the pavement from altitude and stamped heartily on it afterwards.
In the living room, Lars was staring intently at his television that was displaying his newly acquired treasures, and making gargling noises deep in his throat.
A young and innocent maiden selling Girl Scout cookies would have had a difficult, probably painful (but instructive), experience had she chanced to peddle her wares in the apartment complex that late afternoon and made the disastrous decision to bang on the wrong door.
Later, Chuck went into the kitchen and put some pork chops into the broiler.
“Are you decent, Eric? Can I come out there?”
There was a spate of mumbling followed by the silence of the awful background music on the tape currently being watched.
“I’m just fine, Chuck. What do you want?”
“Dinner in a few minutes.”
Lars was red in the face as he worked his way through a dinner of pork chops, sweet potatoes, applesauce and cornmeal buns.
“Enjoy your National Geographic tapes, Lars? A bit of nudity in old Africa?”
Lars mumbled something unheard.
“What? Speak up, lad. Don’t talk with your mouth full as Lenin said to his wife while she was under his desk.”
“I said there are no black people on those tapes.”
“There are none left alive in Africa anyway. They’ve all died of AIDS. Which I suppose is a good thing for all the wildlife. There won’t be any more killing of elephants, lions, cape buffalo, dik-diks, zebra…”
“What? What did you say? Killing dicks?”
“A small ruminant, Lars, not a penis. The natives have been screwing each other up the ass for years and now they’re all dead or dying. It’s wonderful to see what happens when the evil white man leaves an area. Instead of a beautiful native culture flowering, we have mass buggery and protracted death.”
Lars cleaned his plate and rummaged around in the kitchen looking for more.
“Did you ever count all the money, Chuck?” he asked as he spooned some ice cream into a saucer..
“Oh yes, the very first thing when I got back. With what we got in Brentwood, San Francisco and don’t forget Santa Cruz, we now have almost five hundred thousand dollars.”
Lars dropped the ice cream-filled saucer with a smash..
He stared, wide-eyed from the kitchen door.
“That’s a half a million dollars, Chuck. I just figured it out,”
“Good for you, Eric. With a mind like that, you ought to be working for the OMB.”
“What’s that?” Eric-Lars said as he cleaned up the mess on the kitchen floor.
“Office of Management and Budget in Washington. You’d be the very best man they had. Why none of their employees can count past ten unless they take off their shoes. Of course then they can count to twenty. Twenty-one if they open their fly. That only holds good for men, of course. Women can only count to twenty unless they have some kind of an appliance inserted in them.”
“Appliance?”
“Go get me a plate of ice cream and forget the appliances. You’ll never need to know about things like that.”
Later, they found themselves sitting in the living room watching the holocaust of Santa Cruz with the sound turned down.
“That was a nice dinner, Chuck. Where did you learn to cook?”
“I can cook better than most restaurant chefs so why waste the money? What we had tonight would cost us fifty bucks at a fancy restaurant with some faggot waiter hovering around with a giant pepper mill telling us to enjoy.”
Lars watched as the roller coaster collapsed again.
“Does that bother you, Chuck? I mean all the people that got squashed?”
Chuck shrugged and turned off the set with his remote.
“Shit happens, Lars, every day. Churches collapse on old ladies at prayer, day care centers blow up, planes full of orphans on their way to see the Pope crash into mountains, the Navy accidentally blows up a passenger plane with a missile and they blame it on a faulty gas tank, some big company pours deadly chemicals into the ground and ten miles away, babies are born without heads. That’s shit and it does happen. Lars, next week there will be some other shit for the boobies to drool over. The Prince of Wales is caught nude with a dead sheep or the President throws his wife out the window of the White House and blames it on slippery floors. No one really cares about such things friend, so why not just let me go to bed and watch your tapes? Have you seen them all yet?”
Lars shook his head quickly.
“Oh no, not yet. I still have fifty three to go.”
“Be careful that you don’t go blind, friend. And a good night to you.”
Lars called to him just before Chuck closed his bedroom door.
“Can we do this again sometime, Chuck? That was really an exciting time.”
“I don’t think so, Eric. When Fortune goes past, one has to grasp the hem of her garment or be left behind. I think we pulled her skirt clean off this time and I don’t think we’ll be able to do that again. Good night.”
Chuck was wrong because other opportunities would arise, ones that would be even more exciting, and he never stopped grabbing.
The next day he was planning to have some business cards and letterheads printed and he was anticipating nothing more than a boring morning. What he would find instead was Fortune, clad in a new skirt, crashing towards him through the underbrush.
(Continued)
This is also an e-book, available from Amazon: