wayweird

Today is Buffalo Bill Day.

So what? Who’s that?

No, we’re not talking about the serial murderer from Silence of the Lambs.

We’re taking a look at a man of the late 19^th Century. Buffalo Bill (Col. William F. Cody) was the symbol of the American Wild West. Although much of what the public saw was purely showmanship, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show gave the world a thrilling view of the American frontier.

Cody was born on this day in 1846.

With the help of a good press agent, Buffalo Bill parlayed his experiences as a Pony Express rider and a frontier scout into a lucrative show business career that romanticized the Wild West. He introduced thousands throughout the eastern United States and Europe to a gussied up, fantastic picture of the old frontier.

In these politically correct times many have demonized Cody as a heartless Indian killer and an environmental terrorist who wiped out the North American buffalo herds single handedly. They condemn the man because they have bought into the legendary image he manufactured for the stage.

The real Buffalo Bill respected the aboriginal inhabitants of the plains. He may have killed upwards of 4200 bison in his lifetime, but he didn’t massacre them wholesale and leave them to rot. Like the Native Americans whom he often accompanied on their hunts, he killed only enough to provide the food that was required.

Cody was fair in his business dealings with Native Americans. When he launched his show he hired Chief Sitting Bull and a band twenty braves to add even more dash to the already colorful performances. He paid them pretty well too. Sitting Bull earned about $50 a week for riding once around the arena, where he was a popular attraction. On top of that he earned a small fortune by charging for his autograph and picture, although he often gave away his money to the homeless and beggars he met while the show toured the country.

The reality of Col. William F. Cody differed from the legend of Buffalo Bill.

A good lesson to take away from today’s story might be:

Look Beyond the Stage Image

Check out at the actions of the real man or woman and base your judgments on fact rather than fancy.

What the hell is a cult of personality? Is it something like that group of nut jobs that followed Thulsa Doom in the movie Conan?

Don’t worry about answering. I’ll just Google it.

Mmm…says here that a cult of personality occurs when a nation’s leader uses mass media to create a heroic public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to general hero worship, except that it is created specifically for political leaders. However, the term may be applied by analogy to refer to veneration of religious or non-political leaders.

Ok. It looks like I came pretty close with that Thulsa Doom analogy. I was just curious because I saw that on this day in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev surprised the delegates at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with a speech that denounced the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Stalin.

Yeah, looks like Stalin had his very own cult of personality going there, and that makes sense because Wikipedia says that cults of personality are often found in dictatorships. Stalin was one of the top three dictators back in the day, right? He certainly deserved a cult of personality as good as or better than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s. What’s the point of being a dictator if no one glorifies you?

At the very least a cult of personality provides a leader with a god-like and infallible image. His portraits are hung in homes and public buildings - and they had better not be hung crooked. Some real special dictators who owned deluxe cults of personality even had giant images of themselves painted on the walls of buildings along with their own special slogans. Hitler’s slogan was “One People, One Reich, One Leader.” Another dictator back in the ‘80’s  loved “Lead, Coach, Teach, Learn”.

The best part about having a cult of personality is that artists and poets are legally required to produce only works that flatter the leader, which means no political cartoons that lampoon or misrepresent are allowed.

Dictators need to come across as Messiahs because their regimes usually seek to radically transform society according to (supposedly) revolutionary new ideas, and that’s a tough job. It makes change a hell of a lot easier if the leader comes to be treated as a benevolent super-hero “guide” for the nation.

Come to think of it…didn’t Obama say he wanted his rule to be transformative? Hmmm. And you never hear the mass media saying anything bad about him, in fact they love him. And that slogan - what was it? “Change we can believe in!” and “Yes, we can!” Wow - that last one’s almost as good as “Seig Heil!”

 Kind of looks like we have a cult of personality building around Obama. But don’t worry. We’re safe. We don’t have to hang his picture at home yet, and there are no big posters with his mug on any walls - yet.

But hang on. Lookie here:

Hundreds of Chicagoans who visited the auto show at McCormick Place snapped up special commemorative Obama license plates at 50 dollars a pair. The plates feature a large picture of Obama and read Illinois salutes President Barack Obama.
David Drucker with the Illinois Secretary of State’s office says a thousand drivers bought the temporary plates during the ten days of the auto show.

Drucker says, “This is what is called a special event plate which means that it’s not a permanent license plate. Rather it’s good for a 60-day period which will expire on April 17th.”

Phew! He had me worried there for a minute. Wouldn’t it be horrible if these things were mandatory and you had to stare at them everywhere you drove in Illinois? That would be even worse than having Obama’s face plastered on the walls of every government building in the state.

So I reckon we’re safe from any Obama cult of personality. Besides, a cult of personality doesn’t have to be associated with a dictatorship. Democracies can have them as well. Former Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos led a large personality cult, and many of his supporters still revere him in a manner that is nearly on a religious level. And Argentina’s Juan and Eva Peron were cult figures too.
See. We’ll be fine.

“Remember the Maine!” Anyone who got caught up in the emotion of these words when they first rang out is long gone. Given the state of the Democrat run government schools it’s a wonder even a handful of us has an inkling that this battle cry refers to the bombing of the U.S. battleship Maine in Cuba’s Havana harbor.

When it happened on this date, in 1899, I wonder how many Americans were convinced that the Spanish were the perpetrators. Newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst, had long been agitating for a confrontation, but it was the destruction of the Maine that finally triggered the Spanish-American War.

It seems we always need one dramatic (traumatic?) incident to bring everything to a head and push us into reckless action - even though there are other better reasons to take more effective remedies earlier. A gruesome, heart rending murder can spur paranoia and tighter, new legislation when all that was really needed beforehand were simple crime prevention measures. A financial crisis can be engineered over the years to stampede the public into electing a leader who makes use of false claims and the people’s fear to gain power.

Do any of you see any other problems out there waiting for a decisive incident to ignite impetuous action?

Geheimstaatpolizei?

What the hell is that? Looks German to me. Hang on, I’ll Google it.

Here it is. Yep, it’s German alright.

Geheimstaatpolizei is one of those ten mile long German words that translate into three or four English words.  In this case the English words are “Secret State Police”. The Germans must have thought Geheimstaatpolizei was a pretty big mouthful too, so they usually referred to it as the Gestapo. (Geheime Staats Polizei - get it?).

Oh! Oh!  The Gestapo! Anyone who has ever watched one of those old black and white World War II movies (or even Indiana Jones) knows about Hitler’s dreaded secret police.

I was curious because I just learned that on this date in 1936 the Gestapo became a law unto itself. On February 10, 1936, the Nazi Reichstag passed the ‘Gestapo Law’ which included the following paragraph: “Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts.”

This meant the Gestapo was now above the law and there could be no legal appeal regarding anything it did. From this point forward it was totally possible for anyone to be arrested, interrogated and sent to a concentration camp for incarceration or summary execution, without any outside legal procedure.

Surprisingly, the Gestapo was a fairly small organization when you consider the impact it had on German society. At its zenith it retained only about 40,000 employees, including office personnel and the plain-clothes agents. What made the Gestapo so effective was its use of regular citizens as spies and informants who reported to a relatively small band of Gestapo agents. Those Nazis agents really knew how to network.

The problem for the average citizen was that no one ever knew for sure just who those informants were. Was the grocery clerk reporting to the secret police? Or was it the old lady across the street? Maybe a quiet co-worker at the next desk was an informant. Maybe it was even your child’s playmate.

The result was paranoia - fear ruled the day. Most people realized the requirement for self-censorship and usually refused to talk politics, unless they had something positive to say about the administration.

Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke (you know the type - people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Mark Levine) in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. Then they disappeared.

Letters were also sent out demanding an appearance at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, to answer a few questions. (You know - something like an IRS audit.)  You had to go and…you usually had to stay.

Pedestrians strolling outside the Gestapo prison center in Berlin (the Columbia-Haus) reported that they could hear screaming coming from inside.

From the first day Hitler took power, the constant fear of arrest and indefinite confinement in the camps stripped the German people of their personal freedom and left them as subdued and reliably obedient subjects.

But even that was not enough. The Nazis wanted total control. They wanted the people to get their minds right. And so, in the same manner as they had eradicated their hated political enemies, they began a campaign to purge hated “unGerman” ideas. That effort started in May 1933 with book burnings.

So that’s your history lesson for the day.

Now you can just shake your heads and go about your business thinking, “Silly Germans. How did they end up like that? We’d never have secret police or burn books here. We’re safe in the USA!”

Well, if you don’t count pressure to conform to politically correct behavior on college campuses you might be right. If you don’t count laws against “hate” speech you might be right. If the push to eliminate conservative talk radio through the Fairness Doctrine comes to naught you may be right.

And if you forget the fact that the Internal Revenue’s Special Services Staff  has been known to target individuals with no known tax problems for audit simply because of their political activities you can rest easy.

I’m sure there were a lot of Germans who comforted themselves that way as well.

 Today marks the birthday of the undisputed record holder for the shortest U.S. Presidential term ever served. In 1773 William Henry Harrison was born. On March 4, 1841 Harrison was inaugurated. Within days he caught a cold, and exactly one month later, President Harrison was dead.

On top of setting the record for the shortest time in office, Harrison’s death set up a few other firsts in American history.  He was the first president to die in office and his death caused three presidents to serve in a single calendar year (Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler), a situation which has occurred only twice. The second time was in 1881, when Rutherford B. Hayes was succeeded by James A. Garfield, who was assassinated later in that year. With the death of Garfield, Chester A. Arthur became President.

Harrison’s death exposed some shortcomings in the constitution’s clauses on presidential succession. Although the constitution said the vice president would take charge after the death of the president, it did not stipulate whether the vice president would become president, or merely acting president. Another hitch was that the constitution was not clear on whether the vice president could serve the remainder of the president’s term, until the next election, or if emergency elections should be held.

Harrison’s cabinet maintained that John Tyler was “vice president acting as president”. Only after consulting with the Chief Justice Roger Taney did they decide that if Tyler took the presidential Oath of Office he could become president in fact. Tyler obliged and was sworn in on the sixth of April.

 In May, Congress convened, and after some debate in both houses a resolution was passed that confirmed Tyler in the Presidency for the remainder of Harrison’s term. Once established, this precedent of presidential succession remained in effect until the twenty-fifth amendment was ratified in 1967.

The twenty-fifth amendment dealt with the finer points of succession by clearly defining in what situations the vice president was acting president and in what situation they could become president.

Because of his very short term President Harrison also holds the record as the only President not to appoint a single federal judge, at any level.

 Every once in a while you’ll hear the expression “Fact is Stranger than Fiction”. Perhaps these days it would be more apropos to say that fact has caught up with fiction. Jules Verne, who was born in 1828 on this day, was the master of science fiction in the 19^th Century. You might say he invented the genre.

Verne wrote about traveling around the world in eighty days at a time when it took settlers in Conestoga wagons 5-6 months to span half of North America. He wrote about navigating the bottom of the sea during an era when it was considered remarkable that a Confederate submersible was able to sneak up on and sink a Union sloop-of-war anchored 5 miles away from its launch point.

Of course, now his writings seem more like predictions than fiction. May be he was psychic.

Speaking of which, NASA provided Verne a fine birthday remembrance on February 8, 1974 when three astronauts manning the Skylab 3 space mission safely returned to earth after spending 84 days in orbit.

On this day in 1789, the U.S. Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first President of the United States. Washington remains the only president to ever receive 100% of the electoral votes and the only one who had not wanted or sought the office.

Washington was sworn in as the first President under the Constitution for the United States of America on April 30, 1789 at Federal Hall (on Wall Street of all places) in New York City.

The 1^st United States Congress voted to pay Washington a salary of $25,000 a year-a large sum at that time. Washington, already wealthy, declined payment, since he valued his image as a selfless public servant. He eventually accepted compensation, at the urging of Congress, to avoid setting a precedent that would leave the impression that the presidency would be limited only to independently wealthy individuals who could serve without any salary.

As president, Washington lived up to his already solid reputation as an able administrator and an excellent judge of talent and character. He surrounded himself with a sophisticated team of advisors and successfully delegated most of the responsibility for the conduct of their offices to those trusted colleagues.

When confronted with the difficult task of putting together a cabinet from scratch - with no model to guide him - he got it right the first time. He never had to hold a press conference to say “I screwed up.”  He never complained about being frustrated. He forged ahead and set precedents for his successors to follow.

Washington only reluctantly agreed to serve a second term of office as president and refused to run for a third, establishing the precedent of a maximum of two terms for a president. More than 40 years of hard public service had drained him physically, mentally, and financially. He was more than happy to hand over the reigns of office to his successor, John Adams, and then return to Mount Vernon to resume farming.

 Perhaps some of you are aware that today has special meaning. I’m ashamed to say I was unaware until yesterday.  Today is Four Chaplains Day. It marks the heroism of a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and two Protestant ministers who gave their lives to save other soldiers when the troop transport Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic during the Second World War.

These United States Army chaplains calmed frightened soldiers and sailors, helped the troops board lifeboats, and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. They remained aboard the ship as the crew and passengers abandoned the sinking vessel. Two hundred thirty of the 904 men aboard the ship were rescued.

On this day in 1943, Father John Washington, Rabbi Alexander Goode, Reverend George Fox, and Reverend Clark Poling sacrificed their lives in a war to defend freedom and defeat the evils of National Socialism.

 Back in September, 1869 a gigantic, ten-foot tall petrified man was discovered by some workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York. Word of his presence quickly spread, and soon thousands of people thronged to Stub Newell’s farm to see the colossus. They kept on coming even when Newell began charging fifty cents a head for the privilege of viewing this sensation.

Everyone wondered what this giant might be. There were all kinds of theories, but the two most popular schools of thought narrowed down to those who were convinced that it was a petrified man and those who believed it to be an old statue.

Christian Fundamentalist believed that it was one of the giants mentioned in the Bible, Genesis 6:4, where it says, “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Those who promoted the statue theory speculated that a Jesuit missionary had carved it sometime during the seventeenth century to impress the local Indian tribes.

The truth is that the Cardiff Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He conceived the idea of burying a stone giant in the ground after he and a Methodist minister had an argument about whether the Bible should be taken literally. Hull, an atheist, didn’t think it should. But the minister insisted that even the passage where it says ‘there were giants in the earth in those days’ should be read as a literal fact.

So Hull came up with his fake giant.  He figured he could use it not only to poke fun at Biblical literalists, but also make some money.

This hoax paid off pretty well for him. His expenses in material, labor and shipping totaled up to $2600, but a group of businessmen paid $37,500 to buy the giant and move it to Syracuse, where it could be more prominently exhibited.

This situation rose to new heights of craziness when P.T Barnum got involved. He offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When the Syracuse syndicate turned him down, Barnum had a plaster replica fabricated. He put his giant on display in New York, claiming that his was the real giant and the Cardiff Giant was a fake.

The Syracuse businessmen sued Barnum, but the judge told them that they had to swear on genuineness of their own giant in court if they wanted a favorable injunction.

On this day in 1870 both Cardiff giants were officially exposed as hoaxes.

Of course this was neither the first nor the last time people have been asked to put their faith in a falsehood. Here’s the eternal challenge. What is real? What is true? What is fake?

What’s the biggest hoax in town is these days?

Mmmm…the phrase “Stimulus Package” comes to mind. So much pork and so little stimulus…do you think Obama, Reid or Pelosi might be related to P.T. Barnum? 

Like him, they believe that every crowd has a silver lining.