After a quarter‐century as an Oregonian, I finally experienced one of the state’s iconic events. My daughter and I attended the Oregon Country Fair. This countercultural extravaganza on six acres of oaks along the Long Tom River west of Eugene has been encouraging thousands to let their freak flag fly since 1969. There are multitudes of angles to […]
Six Days on Peleliu, Part One
The landing beaches were enfiladed with hardened machine gun positions and grazing fire on either flank, booby trapped with land mines and improvised explosives, and all the while the Marines remained under accurate fire from mortars and artillery buried and unobservable in the hills beyond. All of this remained true even after several days of naval bombardment and the US Navy’s assurances that there were no longer any targets available to their gunners on Peleliu.
Called By No Name
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except “deportees”? — Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) by Woody Guthrie “You think […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part IV — The Long Reach Of The Secret Elite
Cecil Rhodes dreamed the Secret Society — Alfred Milner gave it life. A journalist and then a colonial administrator, Milner was the perfect man to take up leadership of Rhodes’ Secret Society, for he was as ardent a “British Race patriot” as Rhodes himself, and considerably more capable when it came to pulling political strings. He […]
The Old North Trail
The meeting between the Blackfoot party and Lewis’ own did not end well. The following morning several of the Blackfoot – according to Lewis – crowded around the campfire and stole a number of rifles, including those belonging to Drewyer and Lewis. A chase ensued in which there was a fight, and R. Fields stabbed a Blackfoot through the heart with his knife. The fight then was then general – as other Blackfoot were attempting to steal horses — and ended when Lewis shot a Blackfoot in the belly. It was a close run thing, as Lewis wrote upon the return fire he “felt the wind of the ball very distinctly.”
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part III — The Secret Elite Stumbles Out Of The Gate
A cabal of wealthy and/or politically and socially connected Englishmen — a “Secret Elite” — forms in 1891 to ensure Anglo‐Saxon domination of the world as it enters the 20th Century. They seek a federated Empire — the white dominions acting as partners with the Mother Country — and the recovery of the United States. To achieve these […]
Wrestling With Rhodes — Part II — The Quest For Ophir
Cecil Rhodes was one of the worlds richest men, having acquired his fortune through amalgamating diamond claims in Kimberley, South Africa, to create a monopoly that continues to dominate the trade to this day. He made a second fortune in the world’s richest gold field on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. He was a Robber Baron in a Gilded […]
Sentosa Island Blues
I’ve read speculative reports that Trumpy has suggested throwing up a few McDonalds restaurants in North Korea, and as funny and ridiculous as that sounds, maybe the Golden Arches could serve as a kind of ping‐pong diplomacy for the modern age. Because even the most ardent communist occasionally, deep down inside, craves a Big Mac and fries.
Bruno’s Country Club
The cast of players who inhabited the Country Club on a Saturday night only reinforced the notion. Miners, cowboys, truckers, hunters, itinerant singers, Indians, Mexicans, Whites and Basques, we were all drawn to Bruno’s in a kind of marvelous modern rendezvous. It could, and sometimes did, get rowdy.
Crumbling Colossus
Looks like the punditry is catching up to a principle that underpins The Running Iron Report’s worldview: The Imperial Colossus is just too damn big. In a May 11 op‐ed in The New York Times, sociology professor Neil Gross notes that: Last month the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that Americans are losing faith in their […]
The Toxic Masculinity of Titus Pullo
Lately I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about toxic masculinity and its destructive effects on individual men, and by extrapolation on society in general.
But what is it?
Bad Gun and Four Bears
The Mandan, as a nation of people, were hit by numerous waves of smallpox and cholera, whooping cough, measles, and pivotally, epidemics of Norwegian rats that came in on riverboats. At first, the Mandan and Hidatsa, who had never seen a brown rat, were entranced and even happy to have the rats, because they ate the deer mice that had long plagued their earthen lodges.
