Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

          January to May has grim reminders from history and what may be learned from them. The first month calls to mind Martin Luther King, Jr. and that despite his sacrifice, racism is as bad as ever. The end of January, in 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and it’s truly shameful if there’s no lesson in that. February’s Valentine’s Day finds us more in love with guns than with people, and no relief in sight.

The Battle for the Alamo spanned Feb. 23 to March 6 of 1836 but its myth is eternal. Mexico had laws against enslavement but once the new Texans bought land cheap there in exchange for citizenship, they declared it theirs and set about to steal it.

          Davy Crockett didn’t die fighting but was arrested and executed for being the insurrectionist he and his cronies were, but half of us love people like that—“Jan. 6” being a case in point. The Alamo was but another “patriotic story” that puts a nice face on criminality as long as we’re the beneficiaries. It was a land-grab pure and simple, and hardly our only one.

March brings St. Pat’s Day and, like Cinco de Mayo and most ‘celebrations,’ is a drunken orgy–as if liquor stores would barely survive otherwise.

The Ides of March holds a special place in our hearts thanks to Shakespeare, who got the story wrong. Julius Caesar was a very remarkable guy in a very violent time. But the Roman republic was as messy as modern day democracy, and the empire grew too far and too fast for ordinary leaders. Brutus was not his closest friend, but Caesar had long taken him under his wing so, yes, Brutus was just another shameful Judas. But read The Bard closely: someone much closer to Julius was the real culprit. Anyway, men were men and life was cheap, and it happens all the time.

My own shameful date is early April and the Battle of Shiloh in our very un-Civil War, which was over slavery, not States’ Rights. My maternal grandfather, though no believer in enslavement, grew up among rebels. Decades older than my grandma; born not far from where Jeff Davis came into this world; and influenced by an older friend, he went to war against his country, for which it’s hard to forgive him.

He was just a scared 21-year old when he took a bullet in his upper leg, but was spared removal of that limb in a field hospital, meaning he carried the missile the rest of his life—right where it had landed. Family redemption came when my father and his dad fought in the Mexican civil war, which lasted three times longer than ours. There the rebels won against a truly corrupt government, put an end to the Church’s chokehold on everything, and kept slavery outlawed.

The Titanic was a mid-April tragedy of 1912, AKA, and I annually remind that it was when the world’s greatest metaphor hit an iceberg, and John Jacob Astor cried, “I rang for ice, but this is ridiculous!” Of course, it wasn’t really funny but the story does get old. What’s shameless is our belief that anything is “unsinkable.” Such is, more famously, among history’s “famous last words.”

My “shameless plugs” are: thanks to Nu Kitchen for displaying my poetry throughout National Poetry Month; to the local art association for including some to complement a recent exhibit; and to the Firehouse as its staging of “Eurydice” and displaying a number of my poetic interpretations of Greeks myths on the performance level; and to the local Art Association for using several of my poems to complement themes of recent exhibits.

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