Blind Man in a Dark Room

 The Archbishop of Canterbury

     The Gringo Viejo has made a commentary on another blog, defending another Anglican traditionalist.  So that all OROGs will know what the dirty laundry of another family looks like, it is being included below.  The announcement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that he is now to graze in greener meadows brings a bit of relief to those who have suffered a decade of pointless, meaningless mumblings that bring to mind warm mayonnaise.   This is said with some deference to warm mayonnaise, which undoubtedly has greater relevance to the Will of God and the fulfilment of His desire that we strive to save our souls and the souls of all mankind than did this peculiar secular humanist in priest's raiment.

     Another like-minded fellow named Kurt, stated his opinion on another blog, and it was the pleasure to stand with him after his comments were essentially ridiculed by a "more enlightened" cleric.

Kurt,

    You are right.

     Those of us who are wounded by the radical notions of secular humanists presenting themselves as holy men and worthy guides along the straight and narrow do certainly agree with you.
     It is amazing to note that this ABC could muddle and obfuscate so much in so little time.   Some might say he was overwhelmed by the "divisiveness and politicisation" that the Church has suffered during the past 40 years.   Those are code words for flatearthers who believe in Holy Mysteries, Church Canon, Traditions, and natural law as established by Yahweh.  The only fire and brimstone we have seen for years is the blistering hatred the Church hierarchy has for those who long for a time when the Archbishop of Canterbury could make at least one or two references to the Nazarene or His Father during his dull, prolonged, tortuously twisted meaningless commentaries.

     Nay! Nay!   We were those who were.   The secular humanists and the social justice people came and changed the Church and them blamed us for the Church's failings.  They said they would fill the pews...and they are more empty than before.   They have elevated perversity, worship of humanity, and idealised materialism.   They have resuscitated a few obscure practises from yon so as to show that they are  also traditionalists, but they never really evoke the inner feeling in a congregation that there is any sharing of belief in the unseen.   The only thing they worship seems to be "equivilisation"....the making everyone and everything "equal".   It is a dreary gospel, written by Voltaire, Robespierre, Marx, and Engles....and it does not belong in an Episcopal or Anglican Church.

We pray for the Black African Bish0p to be called to reinvigorate this great part of the Body of Christ.  That Thy will be done
aka El Gringo Viejo

Oil Companies are not the problem

     The problem is that somebody found out that oil people....the rig workers, the doodle-buggers, the wildcatters, the royalty holders, the refiners, the truckers, the pipeliners, the roughnecks are not saints.   Most of them are not even lower level acolytes.

       Therefore, people who know nothing about the oil business like to blame the oil companies for every real and imagined difficulty in their lives.    And, if a person is especially petty and self-absorbed, he particularly resents the oil companies violating the compact they had about giving anybody and everybody fuel for whatever price the buyer wanted to pay.

       Oreally raves on and on, and it has to be that he is either willfully ignorant of the nature of the entire industry, or that he is a closet socialist.    The top 20 oil and gas explorers, producers, distillers, transporters, and end-marketters pay over 150,000,000,000 dollars in local, State, and central government taxes each year.    Royalty holders pay another 22,000,000,000 dollars, each year is such taxes.    B0n Jovi pays 150 dollars of real estate taxes in New Jersey because of exemptions he qualifies for because he has some bee-hives on his properties....properties that have several million dollars of value.   El Gringo Viejo pays more than that in McAllen school taxes just on a couple of old gas wells.

     The oil business pays over one hundred and seventy-two billion dollars in various taxes last year.    And, they provide the cheapest and best gasoline in the world to its clients in America.   The solution to the energy problem is not Solyndra, or autos with solar powered propellers, or algae oil.   The solution is to bind the three nations of the North American Continent into a "cartel'' of the good, and agree to produce and deliver to ourselves first and then sell our surplus to other markets.    The oil and gas industry would make good money on that market, albeit a little less, and the prices would remain low because of the lower cost of transportation.

Natural gas is already so cheap some people are trying to figure out how to feed it to their children without blowing them up, or having them float off into the blue.

    We are off early in the morning tomorrow.   We return on Saturday, the Lord willing and the Devil not objecting.

El Gringo Viejo

     

     

So All Know El Gringo Viejo is only daft a' smidgen.

     "Grandma, what's wrong with Old Man Stanford?"

      "He's alright, Davy.   It's just that he's a tad teched."

       That resolved everything.   So we go on about our business trying to find out where the wild chickens had been puttin'.      Grandma Mamie kept about 60 hens in their cages, and let the roosters to light in the trees overnight.    Some hens, who apparently were claustrophoic, preferred to stay out and take their chances with the coyotes, foxes, feral cats, bobcats, and o'possums.  The roosters were so dumb...well, you know...they were males.

      We found a dozen and a half, some were poulet eggs, and as we went back to the side entrance of the rambling, frame farm house, I asked my grandmother, "Grandma, what do you think bein' a tad teched is like?"
      "Well, you know.   Go and put'n those eggs in that bowl of fresh well-water.    Bein' a tad teched is like being daft a' smidgen," Mamie said after a bit of contemplation.
     El Gringo Viejo, who is daft a' smidgen, includes this scanning from the main economic events newspaper in this part of the frontier so that OROGs will know that their blogmeister is not totally fallen off the edge.   The article deals with the environment from whence I came, where I dwealt, and what is actually going on in the 99.9% area of what is Mexico.   The security issues are real, but it is not what one deals with 99.99% of the time when tending to birdwatchers, loafers, and photgraphers in some corner of rural Mexico, for instance.
     Every day things become a little bit better.   Every day things become a little bit better.   Two steps forward and one step back.   And we have the Mexican Army and Naval Infantry.   Those two institutions have given Mexico, and El Gringo Viejo, frankly...a reason to be ultimately optimistic about an increasingly positive future.   A future with no Obama and with a Mexico Retaken, an America Restored, and a Canada establishing the clear path to leaving socialism in the rear-view mirror.    The above article was published in Texas Border Business, vol. 7 no. 9 March, 2012. 

This is what we see and experience.   This is the trucks on the highways hauling stuff from the

United States and Canada, and hauling stuff up to the United States and Canada.  We have

a front row seat on a fascinating place that never seems to change, yet is always changing.

It's like a trip with no dope, dude. 

Thanks for your time and attention.   More Later.  We shall be heading north to babysit the granddaughters for a bit.   We shall try to make some more salient observations while up-state.

El Gringo Viejo

Eric Holder - Fire Sale on Pants (blast from the past)

Several Points that need to be repeated, clarified, and understood by All OROGs:

      The first point concerns Eric Holder specifically and the entire Obamaham administration generally..   Any notion that Eric Holder is concerned about voting rights for "Hispanics" is preposterous.   He views "Hispanics" as stupid, greasy cannon fodder to be used in any way he and the entire marxist cause wish to use them.   The overall aim of his particular group on the left edge of the universe is to make certain everyone....."hispanic", black, white, green, Martian, sabre-toothed, tramsgendered, lesbian vegetarians, left-handed tiddly-winks players....everyone.... is placed either as an ant in an anthill or a bee in a bee hive.    He intends to have each knowing his place, each doing his assigned task, each receiving according to his need, and each giving according to his ability.   And, incredibly enough, Eric Holder thinks he will be one of the Queen Bees who decides who goes wherever and does whatever.

       So he counts on innocent ignorance, blatant stupidity, demagoguery, and outright aggravated mendacity to forward his agenda.    He thinks, "Like me, everybody knows that Mexicans are stupid.   So, I can go before a federal court and enjoin the Republic of Texas from requiring voters to have an official identification bearing a picture of the registrant."
       Common forms of such identification can include, but are not limited to, driver's licenses, passports, and military identification.  Texas offers non-drivers an official identification card upon demonstration of proof of citizenship by birth, naturalisation, or proof of legal resident aliency with the appropriate certificate from the United States Department of State.

         Eric Holder, however, is counting on what he hopes is a general public impression that Americans with Mexican and/or other Latin American ancestry or origin, are stupid.   He must necessarily argue against the facts by saying  "These people are so stupid, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoid of any ability to defend themselves in the common execution of normal life-chores, that they should not be required to do what everybody else in the Republic of Texas must do."

          Although there is no such thing as a Mexican race, or a Latin American race, the proponents of this initiative by Holder's Department of Justice say the policy of the Republic of Texas is "racist".   This proves, further, that the DOJ attorneys are dolts since they have not the remotest understanding of sociology, anthropology, or human genetics.    They are counting on the rest of the American public to be as bigotted as they themselves.

           Their objective in these measures is to "lard-up'' the voter rolls with unqualified voters.   This fits with their overall objective, a Saul Alinsky objective, of  introducing as many unqualified people into the general population as possible, so as to drive up public assistance outlays, foment ethnic anamousity, and generally "third-world" America to death.   Also, the illogic of their position is amply revealed by the fact that Latins are elected to majority Anglo district positions, Anglos are elected in majority Latin districts, and  that neither the Anglo nor the Latin group is homogenous unto itself in terms of voter preference.

All Mexican voters have...and must present at the time
of voting...this document.  The poll workers at that
voting precinct have a roster, in alphabetical order
of the qualified electors...with photo...with thumb
print...and somehow 70,000,000 "stupid Mexicans"
managed to legally acquire this document, and
50,000 voting precincts managed to have the roster
catalogue in place before the polls opened.
Their percentage of participation has gone UP
since the "hard to acquire" electoral registration
document was begun.

     Finally, as concerns this point, we can observe the "stupid Mexican" procedure that is applied to "stupid Mexicans" in Mexico.  The Credencial Electoral Federal is required  of all voters, Indian, Mestizo, Negro, Mulatto, White....everyone.    It must be actuated on or before a date in February of the year of the election.  It is valid for three years.  It has 13 different fraud prevention employments.   It has digital photographic, fingerprint, and iris verification and it has, waiting for the elector at the appropriate voting precinct of the 144,000 in Mexico during nation-wide elections, a compendium of every elegible voter who pertains to that precinct...WITH A PICTURE OF THAT ELECTOR and his or her fingerprint...all in alphabetical order.   Each precinct has, by law, a citizen volunteer appointed by  each of political parties with candidates under consideration working the precinct election process, and a poll watcher from each party that is represented on the ballot(s).   The ballots are marked privately and deposited into a transparent acryllic 'urn'.
      The votes are counted by all the different party members present and counting and recounting continues up to five different times, if the representative of each party wants to count the ballots personally.   Each count must be witnessed by all election workers and official observers and all must sign their accordance with the results before the results can be forwarded to the appropriate entity (State Institute of Elections in the State Capital, for instance). 
     The Credencial Electoral Federal is considered to be a better proof of identification than a passport or birth certificate.   The latter two documents are quite detailed and also have very good security details, in spite of what one might have heard during the years.

     In Texas, we have a crummy piece of posterboard paper, no picture, no fingerprint, no nothing.   That is verified against a voters' roster, a computer printout that also has nothing more than the name, sex, address of the voter.    Our County has a little over 775,000 people, of whom about 435,000 are aged 21 or more. Of that number 287,000 are registered to  vote.  That would seem to include all the native born and  naturalised Americans in the county at this time.    That would be about 63% of the adult population.   About 90% of those are of Mexican national or Spanish colonial origin in whole or in part.   They seemed to have no problem obtaining a voter's registration by showing citizenship papers of the required type.    Many of the ones in the graph below who are shown not to have a correlating Department of Public Safety ID Number might well be using a military identification, since we have a huge number of WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam veterans and, especially among the Latins, who are particularly proud of their service and honourable discharges. 

     Eric Holder does not give a whit if, by purposefully facilitating the registration and participation of unqualified voters, they  dilute....for instance...a Mexican-born individual who fought in France and Germany against the National Socialist nightmare that intended to eat the world.   That individual, once back, had the right to almost automatically gain American citizenship.   How is it, then that Eric Holder can equivilate the value of that individual with some anchor-baby-mother-slug who comes over illegally to participate in the 250-metre pamper-throw competitions  and the accounting wonder of balancing four different Lone Star Card accounts in her head.

     No, Mr. Holder....nobody is kept from legally voting in Texas in these days.   Registration is easy and convenient.   Too easy and too convenient.  It is simply your desire to try to "lard up" the rolls with people you can scare by having your operatives  frighten them with threats of being turned in to the Border Patrol if they don't register and vote.

     And then the second point...of many available.
     Mr. Holder you were successful in one thing, even better than (Sir Edmund) Hillary.   Janet Reno, Gen. Wesley Clark (the Hero of the Battle of Mount Carmel), and (Sir Edmund) Hillary were only able to kill about 63 people among the dumboe religious Kooks...including about 42 especially young children.   Their original offense was in having a bit fewer than the normal number of guns per adult individual in the living area as any other home situation in Texas.   Janet Reno, the FBI, the ATF & E wanted to bring the head of John the Baptist (Vernon Hill, aka David Koresh) to (Sir Edmund) Hillary as an offertory in the War Against Private Ownership of Firearms....especially firearms that look mean or that shoot bullets.   Too bad she couldn't have found the gun Vince Foster used.
      Even though you are so concerned about the sensibilities and conditions pertaining to people of Mexican background, you will be proud that your actions in the effort to disarm the innocent did have a pronounced impact on the Mexican people.   Some 212 soldiers, naval infantry, honest and semi-honest cops, civilian men and women, and some children are all dead now.   They were killed in the case of the military and police engaging cockroaches of the Cartels.   The civilians were killed in crossfires by cockroaches who have no rules of engagement.    You killed 212 people under false pretenses, under incompetent, uncaring admistrative procedures with ulterior, hidden motives.  Well done.

Fire Sale on Eric Holder's Pants.   But who would want them?
El Gringo Viejo             

(UPDATE:   This blog contribution is somewhat dated.   It is a two-pronged blog-entry.  It deals with voters' registrations, and with the gun-grab compulsion of totalitarians.  Since this writing the number of "collateral casualties" in the Mexican drug wars has risen to nearly 500 in which Eric Holder's weapons have been involved.  Once again we are only counting soldiers, naval infantry, honest and semi-honest cops, civilian men, women, and some children are dead now.)

Hollow Victory...Dark Clouds Forming

     We are told to joyously celebrate the victory of the Proletariat when the Che Guevara Government Motors and Mao's Motors posted the great leap forward for the Democratic Peoples' Revolutionary Movement.  Ch.G.Government Motors, which has repaid all the investment made by the People and refined all operations to the highest level in keeping with the precepts as set forth in the Little Red Book, posted Great and Heroic Profits for use by the Peoples' Governing Committee of the Treasury of over 7,000,000,000 filthy, capitalist running-dog dollars.   During the earlier fascist period, the company never made any financial profit, while terrorising and brutalising an essentially enslaved work force.   Payment for their labour was frequently made in last year's professional sporting events tickets.    Now all has changed and families have many heads who can drink whiskey and beer and smoke marijuana before during and after their many rest breaks during the day.    Truly a Workers' Paradise.

     In the meantime, the fascist Germans, long notorious for saying horrid things about women on the radio, could only muster $21,000,000,000 in profits from the sale of their bourgeois conveyances (aka - Volkswagen) that are desired by nobody and bought by very few.  It is well known that the fascist holdovers from the Berlin regime of the 1930s take the vehicles, under cover of darkness, from the factories where many workers are chained to their work benches in their dark and filthy working areas and then dump said vehicles into the North Sea.   All their sales and income figures are made up from the thin air.

     Meanwhile, the World is arriving to Detroit....one of the great metropoli and success stories brought on by strict adherence to Marxist social management procedures....to sign onto the lengthy waiting list for our automobiles.   The Chevrolet Chernobyl  and the Chrysler Commissar are the most popular, while the great concept car, the solar-powered Yugo Volt has become the "must have" of the young, cool, and "with-it" crowd.

         Here is a clip from the end of the last meeting of the old board of directors of the old General Motors and Chrysler,   where the last bond-holder and preferred stock holder was dealt with by majority vote.

For the First Time, many citizens could finally be proud of their
truly backwards and disgusting country.   LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL!

This message was approved by the the Committee for the Defense of the Popular Democratic Union of Auto Workers, 666 Che Guevara Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan S.S.R.

Various Grumpyisms....

     Some serious topics but no really serious talking or writing.    For instance, we are passing the first year's anniversary of the Japanese Earthquakes and the Tsunami disaster at Fukushima.   About a week after the event, El Gringo Viejo declared that this was a disaster of the highest order, but the doomsayers would be wrong.   It was also opined that the Japanese people would have things up and running again in very short order.   The notions, opinions, and forecasts expressed on these pages were accurate.  The Japanese people are a communitarian group.   They have a notion of their communion with their ancestors, they play a good brand of baseball, and they have a recognition of intelligent design in the Cosmos....whether it be revealed by Buddha, or through Shintoism or Taoism, or perhaps some denomination from among the Christians.

     Within another three years, it will have been something sadly remembered, there will be monuments and shrines here and there, but the Japanese will have the entire area returned to a utilitarian, but pleasant, order.    Self reliance, communitarianism, and as another person who admired the Japanese people at there best once said about a great American institution.   "

Duty, Honour, Country".....   It all seems so far removed from the images of helplessness and sloth from New Orleans.    We do have steel in us yet.   Read this to the fourth graders.   Read this to the seniors are graduation.   We shall re-establish this conscious, certain, and vibrant zeal as Americans soon, or people like the one below-cited will become nothing more than a peculiar memory.   Although, it is true, that Old Soldiers never really die, the simply fade away.

General Douglas MacArthur's Farewell Speech

Given to the Corps of Cadets at West Point

May 12, 1962

---

General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps. As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" and when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place, have you ever been there before?"

        No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily for a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code - the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.

Duty, Honor, Country:

        Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
       The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
        They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
        They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

       And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
      Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
       His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
        But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
       In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
       From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
        I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light.
       And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
        Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.
        The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.
      You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres and missiles marked the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind - the chapter of the space age. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a greater, a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; of purifying sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.
       And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.
        

       Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.
        Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war guardians, as its lifeguards from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.
       Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government. Whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as firm and complete as they should be.
       These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.
       You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.
        The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.
        This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
       The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.
     In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.
     Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.
I bid you farewell.
Douglas MacArthur
General of the Army