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These are the times that make men into ogres; hanging around in the house…serving as a chef and bedmaker and chauffeur. It is glorious, perhaps, to have such time and availability…sometimes circumstances allow me to go even so far as the NEXT HEB, and not the closest one. Tell me if freedom and liberty is or is not a wondrous and/or terrible thing…..depending, of course.
But, on to sterner stuff. The quality of grammar, composition, and rhetoric steadily degenerates. One can go back to Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes (for your Spanish), Bobby Burns and Walter Scott, and a slough of scores and hundreds good and great writers and marvel how they managed to penetrate deep into the souls and minds of so many folks.
As an aside, schools closed and even Roman Catholic Churches and Jewish Synagogues remained open on a twenty-four hours basis throughout the South after Margaret Mitchell was killed by a drunk driver in August of 1949. Protestant Churches as well, of course…but it went on for a week or more, the outpouring of grief among the citizenry. Some ladies even expressed condolences to my mother…hugs and other ickey stuff…lots of runny makeup and sniffling simply because my mother was a look-alike to Margaret Mitchell.
Why the hugging and ickey stuff? Without any false pretence this humble writer owns up to the fact that the lady pictured above is Margaret Mitchell. People would stop and ask to take a picture of another lady in McAllen, Texas back in those times thinking that the lady was Margaret Mitchell or a look-alike enough to fool their friends upon returning to the North after the Winter had left (McAllen and the Lower Rio Grande Valley was an important wintering place for "Yankees" in those days). But, she was only my mother. In those moments my greatest desire was probably to go back home and stir up an o'possum so as to have a playmate.
We move on to my various points. For one, it seems uncomely for an obituary to be posted with various spelling errors. I fight them here because of the misinformation and incorrect grammar encountered on a daily basis. "Jose Gomez, age 31, died and was barried in San Lorenzo Cematary with many of his closet family in atendance."is a small example of what we are served. And, if one thinks it is a matter of an occasional blip down here among the unwashed, all the major newspapers in print, it seems, delight in grammatical and spelling errors.
Some sour grapes comes from me due to the fact that some of my writing is drawn from archaic influences and the "spell check" and "grammatical cheque" sometimes works even overtime (like after I have already posted) to make "corrections" for me.
More to the point are the failures in syntax and outright bus wrecks and building collapses one encounters en lieu of paragraphs. For instance, "Mr. Bilbert Rogerstien was detained by officers while driving down Mockingbird Lane last night at a high rate of speed. After stopping the officers smelled liquor and administered a breathalyser exam, which Mr. Rogerstien failed. He was transported to County Jail, and arraigned on a charge of Driving While Intoxicated. He was held on a 100, 000 dollar bond due to his record of repeated violations."
PEOPLE ARE NOT HELD ON BOND!!!! PEOPLE SUSPECTED OF COMMITTING AN EGREGIOUS MISDEMEANOUR OR CRIME, IF THEY CANNOT FORK OVER THE NECESSARY LUCRE, ARE HELD "IN LIEU OF BOND" (meaning, instead of bond, because the dumbo was either broke, left his wallet home, or otherwise could not arrange for any method by which to post a surety bond. He is thrown in the pokey until his wife or sister or bondsman comes up with the lucre. If the lucre never comes, then the arrestee gets to wait for an opening in the Court Docket…a matter of five or six days…or months.). As a for instance, the fellow who killed Margaret Mitchell had 26 arrests for DWI, at the ripe old age of 26. Several of the citations resulted in short stays and slightly longer stays, because the family would scrape up the money to bail him out and then later pay the fines. This last incident, in 1949 stuck him in the pokey for 12 years, being charged with "Vehicular Homicide and Driving While Intoxicated".
But/…you all please remember…a person is held en lieu (or in lieu) of bond…not "on a bond". A person can be released "on a bond" by posting the amount equal to the appropriate judge's requirements, conditions, and/or discretion.
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After solving the problem above-reported we should wish to move on to the matter of the "mail-in ballot" absurdity. First and foremost, we urge all to go an vote during the early voting period (usually about two weeks before the official election day) or, 'cause it's lots of fun really, to vote on election day. One sees long lost acquaintances, friends, and even relatives whose names you cannot remember.
Remembering all that we are writing almost exclusively about the matter of voting in the Republic of Texas. Texas has had an interesting history in terms of some elections, and calamities have occurred in local, country-wide, State-wide, and national contest.
There was a Democrat Primary race in 1948 wherein Coke Stevenson, who had stepped down from the governorship to run for the U.S. Senate seat against a ghastly person by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson who had been a Roosevelt lackey for a couple of terms as United States Representative for a Central Texas Congressional district.
In those years, almost all the State-pertinent races were finished in the primaries, because in all the States of the Old Confederacy, there was frankly no Republican presence and so the matters stayed in the Post - Reconstruction Rules until after around 1962 or so. Texas could vote Republican for a national office like President…but all the "lesser" offices required the approval of Democrat mossbacks. It is just the way it was.
In the primary of 1948, the vote was very close…and I mean VERY close. And guess what? Come to-morrow morning, and the newspapers couldn't name the winner of the election for the position of Senator to be sworn in during January of 1949. There were people who were gunned down during and after the contentions about the vote count. There were inter and intra familial disputes, there were Anglos against Latins, Latins against Latins, Latins for Anglos, etc.etc.etc. Seven people were killed as a direct or indirect result of this dispute about Box 13 and the whole Election of 1948.
Lyndon Johnson was horribly corrupt personally and politically. That's why a broad section of the Texas populace liked the guy. He could "get away" with things. He was an erstwhile rancher, a sometimes school-teacher, and a political gadfly…no philosophy beyond "…how am I going to rake off my share?" His opponent, a fairly popular Governor, was a professional man and a politician of the old school, who tried to move Texas ahead, with low taxes and sober administration. No real imagination…but steady at the helm.
There are still people looking for the "lost suffrage rolls" and the like. As Coke Stevenson had essentially scraped by for his election in 1942 for United States Senator by a total of 1,900 votes more or less, so had Lyndon and Lady Bird won the same Senator's seat in 1948. It was George and nephew Archer's brilliance to take possession of Box 13 of Jim Wells County (adjacent and to the east of the Parr's empire centre in Duvall County) in the city of Alice, Texas. It was reasonably estimated by various "estimators" that the Parr's "influence"controlled, at a minimum, something like 13 counties in the centre of South Texas.
There was an intrepid poll worker and his team who had managed to find another Jim Wells County ballot box during the wee hours. The box held almost 800 ballots. In this case, all voters were Spanish surnamed and they had all signed in with the same style of script…full of flourish and elegance, as if written by a young, well-educated lady. Further, the voters who "signed in" with the elegant hand had the goodness to sign in by alphabetical order. Almost 800 people. Eight days after the close of the election.
The "girl" who did the executive secretarial work had attended and graduated from a private (read 'Roman Catholic') secondary and preparatory in Monterrey's rich district, Ciudad de San Pedro de Garza-Garcia, Nuevo Leon State. Very prestigious and very excellent. The beautiful handwriting was there. She was a bit older but her hand was infallible in terms of quality. It was also said of her that she was the only person in the George and Archer Operation who was honest.
Presently, in Texas a person can request a ballot by mail…but only one. A person, upon receipt of the ballot must fill in the voter's choices, sign in with a regular signature, and then forward the ballot to the registrar at the County Seat. It is recommended, I believe, that a person attempt to mail his/her ballot to the registrar a week before the Tuesday, which is the first Tuesday after the 1st Monday in November of even numbered years in Texas.
What the Democrats across the Nation in these days are pushing is to have the United States Postal Service forward ballots to everyone. That would be an undertaking that would open literally hundreds of Pandora's Boxes in every State of the Union. The same slime who constitute "Black Lives Matter" would have people combing and collecting these blank mailed to "Resident"by the handful. Collection Captains would deliver thousands…scores of thousands of voted ballots without much concern for the dates of compliance and proof of authenticity and qualification as an elector.
Election judges would be in a quandary, and for certain the leftwing activists would be crowding into the offices of the appropriate judges and authorities demanding that the ballots be included, "because everybody should have the right to vote". It will be inevitable.
The one hope we have is the fact that Biden's lack of quality as a candidate might cause a deflation in the willpower of the Democrat voters to actually turn out to vote. This next "democratic function" of the election of 2020 could well make the events of Duvall and Jim Well Counties in 1946 seem like some old cowboy movie.
More Later
EL GRINGO VIEJO
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