Carl from Chicago, posting over at the Chicago Boys, postulates a new class of victims of the financial meltdown.
My heart: It bleeds.
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Victims AboundBy lex, on January 8th, 2009
25 comments to Victims Abound |
Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Amazon AssociateFor the Effort!Winnar! Subscribe CategoriesPagesTagsacademy
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i guess i could scrape up a coupla singles to help the lass in these tough times…
Doesn’t that sound just a wee bit like sour grapes to anyone?
My eyes: They pop open.
Are they real?
(I know. Vain trophy wife and even vainer old, semi-rich husband. Of course, they’re not real! Silly of me to ask. But the comment just seemed to fit. Her tight white blouse, ya know. That kind of fit.)
Subsunk
(Laughing fiendishly)
A lot of sour grapes.
I find successful people, both men and women, to quite often be fascinating individuals. They have people skills, they have interesting stories, they have confidence….and money. What a killer combination for winning people over, including the younger woman (I believe that it’s easier for a man to do this than for a woman in our culture) that such a person might desire for a mate.
When she picks up and leaves, why be surprised? I can’t remember who said “she earned it” by enduring the codger who pays off Wife 1.0 and takes up with Wife 3.0, but I’m inclined to agree. Personally, I don’t think it’s an intelligent act for a 40 something to take up with a 20 something. Not saying it never works, but these days, they really live in two different worlds, unlike the 18th and 19th centuries. A 20 something woman was much more mature back then.
It used to be common for a forty year old to marry a 20 something. He took the time to establish himself and reach a point where he could properly support a wife and her children.
QM,
There was also a time when a young women might marry a much older man in order to have some sort of security. There were a flurry a may/september marriages after the turn of the century, especially down south. These were almost without exception marriages between an aging Civil War veteran and a woman of 18022 years of age.
Often billed as a marriage of convenience, still many were full of love and affection, despite the disparity in ages. The gentleman got someone to watch over him and help him as he aged, and the woman, in turn, got the security of a life-long pension from the veteran. Some resulted in producing children, and it is amazing that the last Confederate widow died only recently, and there there are still a few sons of Civil war veterans alive more than 145 years after that great conflict began.
In my own case, the men of the family have all married late, and I am the great grandson of a Confederate soldier, my own grandfather fought in WWI, and my father in WWII. Now my own son carries on the tradition as an infantryman in an airborne unit.
We are closer still in some ways. I have shaken the hand, and had lovely conversations with, a woman who, as a girl, remembers sitting on the front porch of Joshua Chamberlain’s home and listening to his stories of the Civil war. If that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.
Still and all, there are indeed marriages of convenience, and I do look ascance, as most would, at images such as that accompanying this post. I guess it is the nature of our natures to recoil at such a thought, but if both are happy, then who are we to judge.
respects to all,
An interesting discussion to say the least. Wife Number 1, Lipstick 6 and I have 30 years together with married sons and a grandson. Would do it over again except some of the really stupid stuff I did at times.
BTW, AW1 Tim that lady had to have been born just about 1905 right? Chamberlain died in 1914 from complications of the wound thru the pelvis he received at Petersburg in 1864, IIRC?
ge06,
Correct, sir, Shot through the hips and nicked the urethra. Never fully healed. Chamberlain propped himself up on his sword so as to stay upright and kept urging his men forward. He was given a promotion to Brigadier because no one thought he would live. Fooled them all, and made it back for the final scenes of that terrible conflict.
He suffered from that wound for the rest of his life, but still managed to be Governor, Adjutant General, and President of Bowdoin College before finally shuffling off his mortal coil.
respects,
Still on Wife No. 1 with 16 years and counting. I still recall my wedding day when my family threatening to do me major bodily harm if I did anything stupid to hurt her.
Yep. They liked her more than me. Can’t say as I blame them either.
Damifino how I got that lucky.
Maybe it is because I can and will cook.
Nice cans!
I am the great-grandson of four Confederate soldiers. My paternal Grandpa’s Dad, like Stonewall Jackson, was wounded at Chancellorsville. Unlike Jackson, he survived, with the loss of an eyeball.
I find this rather giggliousy ironic, as the church I attend is an Anglican mission run out of Rwanda, to bring the gospel to the heathen white folks.
I wish I had such a family line full of accomplishment and honors to give me some sense of history.
Near as I can tell, I came from a long line my mother listened to…
(rimshot!)
– Max
Geo6,
The date you gave, 1905, brought to mind my grandmother who was born in that year and died just two years ago. She lived alone in her own home and was as vibrant and alive as ever until she fell, broke her hip and died 10 days later in the hospital.
At Christmas time her daughter took me through the extensive autograph collection that the old lady started as a young girl and it included autographs from people like ADM Byrd and hundreds of others who didn’t just sign their names but wrote letters back and then signed them. It was a very different era. It struck me a few decades ago that this lady was born and lived before we had widespread electricity, before cars, before radio, before television, before cable and before internet and yet she adapted to them all. Her father lived with her and he used to take us down to the shed and spend the day with us there, his potbellied stove and thousands of books. He too, died when he was over a 100 and every day, he woke up, dressed, put on his tie and walked the hundred yards or so to his enclave. so, I’m just now recalling to mind that if she was born in 1905, he was born long before that and here it is, the 21st century and yet while my dad was in Vietnam my sister and I used to spend our days with a man who was born around the time of the war between the states. OK, now, at 48 I feel truly old. Thanks.
I think one of those baloney slice analysts could take a split-second with the picture and predict “Divorce, wife-initiated” in the near future.
Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, i just can’t get this tune outta me head….
“As I walked down a shady lane,
at a door I chanced to knock.
Have ye any pots or kettles,
with rusty holes to block?”
Curtis,
Sounds like you come from a pretty good gene pool regarding longevity. Indeed it was a different era and I would argue a different America. I regret not spending more time with my grandmother in Maine. She was born in ’01 or ’03 and died at the age of 93. I remember her still calling the frig the “icebox” and her home still had appliances that were made in the 30s and 40s, like toasters and mixers. She made a peanutbutter fudge that people would fight for and was always baking. When visiting Gram she treated you like you were the only grandchild she had. (I was one of 41.) I still have dreams about the doughnuts you were treated to. Gram was a tough lady who never complained and never expected a hand out but was always generous with others. She had raised family of 7 pretty much by herself as my grandfather’s family were riddled with TB. It killed my grandfather in 1940. He spent many years in a VA TB sanitarium having served during WWI. Speaking of age differences, he was 36 when he married her, she being 20 and a school teacher in the County. He was born in 1884 so I never knew him. She attended Mass all her life and brought up my dad his brothers and sister the same way. She never remarried and is buried beside him in Ft Fairfield, ME. I like that America Gram lived in much better. It was people like her that made it so.
GE06,
I hear ya. My father was born in 1918 and just turned 90. He still has a cast-iron wood stove in the kitchen, and a coffee pot sitting on it ready to serve. There are some things positive to be said about having children later in life.
geo6 and tim, you two are making me homesick and think of my own grandma, born 1911 if I got it right, and still on her own. Twas a different world she came up in. My father’s grandmother on his father’s side lived to 104. Some damned tough women, indeed.
The high point of our years in Oregon was the annual summer trip back to Tennessee to visit the grandparents in Nashville, and the other pair on the farm where my mother lives now near Whitehouse. Both homes were a trip back in time, to an America that is irretrievably gone. I can still remember shelling corn to feed chickens on the farm, and the trips to Fair Park in Nashville. My grandkids will grow up poorer for the loss.
You bet. Most kids haven’t a clue what it’s like to sit out on the back porch shelling peas for supper, or husking corn, snapping beans, and just enjoying the food that you helped to grow. I hated the chores, but I lived the fresh vegetables, and the smell of coffee and hint of woodsmoke from the kitchen.
Guys/
Both my parents are gone, both born in 1913. I STILL call it the “icebox” as that was what I was raised on. (I’m 64) Funny, although I grew up in a rural community in Illinois where guys used to rabbit hunt before coming to class in the morn in HS, and my wife on a farm just outside Opelousas La., we’re both “big-city” kind of people. But the rural–or semi-rural in my case, I grew up on a college campus–life is a great way to raise kids. At least in the late 40s-early sixties. No drugs, low crime, unlocked doors, roam the town all day by myself on my bicycle in the summer –a different world indeed…..a lost world, really….
Oh, the stories they could tell – my father born in 1903, and my mother two years later. Dad (upon my asking as a youngster) was “too young for WW-I and a little too old for WW-II.” He said they also hesitated taking farmers, too.
Both were well educated for the time. My father studied to be a veterinarian until a family death brought him back early to work the farm. My mother once taught a one-room rural school with a combined class of 7 year-olds mixed in with 14 year-olds, and all ages in between. Most walked long distances, or rode horses to school. Later, after working for the Dept. of Agriculture in Washington during the Depression, she eventually married my father. They farmed on Iowa land (and where I grew up) that my Irish immigrant, Great Grandfather had purchased with some of the accumulated gold dust he and his brother had gained from their prospecting days in California and Virginia City in the mid-to later, 1800s.
Although we had a few farm tractors and modern for then, farm equipment, my father kept a beautiful team of shiny black, (but spirited as I recall) prize workhorses along with appropriate horse-drawn farm equipment, just to keep the old traditions alive. And we used them often, to the enjoyment of many of the really old-timers!
Most of what we put on our table was home grown: Our own butchered livestock, milk, eggs, sweet corn or vegetables. Both the pork and prime beef we raised were better than I have ever had since. (We also had fish, but it was muddy river catfish, and not so good.)
Wednesday night was always rabbit night in season. I would open up the back door and shoot some cottontails that always gathered by some bushes 30 ft. away with my .22. Together, Dad and I would dress them in the basement, next to the warm and burning, coal fed furnace. Mother had a wonderful fried rabbit recipe, and would quickly cook ‘em up. Fond memories. We also ate a lot of pheasant and some squirrel, but deer there were scarce then.
Fortunately, we had indoor plumbing, but many of our neighbors did not. So visiting friends or helping out on a neighbor’s farm was not always so pleasant.
We also had a “party line” phone line with about maybe 8 or more families on it. When the phone rang, it rang in code. As I recall, a 1 long ring with 2 short rings was ours to answer. Others had their own code, like maybe 3 short rings. Of course we all could listen in on each other’s conversations, and many did. But at least three families were of German descent and most always spoke German on the party line, so the silent eavesdroppers couldn’t understand.
Dad – a 3-pack-a-day smoker of unfiltered cigarettes – died too early while in his late 60s. But he had lived and witnessed a lot, was a fine and respected man, and was very proud of my sister and me. However, my mother lived on for another 28 years, never re-marrying and on her own until 93, as sharp and feisty as ever until the day she died.
Sorry for the long TMI. Sometimes it just flows.
With the arms thrown purposefully back so as to highlight…the…uhhh…???
Tim, me paternal grandma given to life in ’06 & passed into the clearing in ’03. Younger brother Roy did likewise 2 years later at 98. Pictures and memories of their stories as wee bairns with wagons, wood stoves, outhouses, and such. Grandma was scarcely 6 yr old when Titanic lost the fight with a big block of ice..
Me sainted (or not) Ma near to KE45 has a wood burning stove with a copper kettle atop. Once upon a time not so long ago whilst the power went on vacation in winter, said stove and kettle kept alive, fed, and warm those who occupied the humble abode. Without complaint, I might add…
Meanwhile, neighbors fared not so well…and spoke of it…often…but me Ma fared well…
The holidays brought negatives of Grandparents and Great Grandparents whilst in their younger years. Aaah, me. How nice that technology allows for transference of such images into a much more usable form today.
fliterman,
It’s all good. My dad somehow has made it to 90, despite a 2-pack a day habit of Lucky Strikes. I remember as a boy in my early teens going down to the spillway beneath the resevoir and camping with my friends. We used our Boy Scout pup tents, and caught rainbow trout in a small stream that meandered through the flats beneath the dam. The stream wasn’t too wide, and we’d make a dam in it with rocks that forced the fish to go through. We stood in the water, and grabbed the fish with our bare hands, then holding onto the tail, whack them on a stone to kill them.
Make up a fire and while the coals got hot, fillet the fish. Cook them up in a small pan with butter over the fire and it was heaven.
It was a very different world. Like you, we had neighbors with an outhouse and a well. We thought nothing of driving to high school with a rifle and/or shotgun in a rack in the rear window of the pickup.
That’s the America we need back. Hopefully, there are enough of us who remember these things to help the younger ones through the hard times ahead.
I suspect all too many of us are of an age to remember the ice box and tv commercials about the ‘dangers of playing with old refrigerators’. Yep. The old ice box reefers had a locking handle that kept them closed and suffocated the odd kid or two who played in old disposed of reefers. Even as a little kid I thought that ice box that remained in place as the frig for over 30 years was an anachronism. My secretary complained for ages about the worthless new frig she bought a couple of years ago that broke down in 2 weeks and how glad she was that she’d kept the old one in the garage as a ‘spare’.