Springtime in GITMO

I had no idea that George Lucas grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas. He must have cause anyone who could write, “If there is a bright and shining spot in the universe, this is the place farthest from it,” had to live in Gravel Pit.


Grand Prairie was a community about the same size as Coos Bay/North Bend, thirty-five thousand in 1950. It was on a sliver of land running along Highway Eighty between Ft Worse and Dallas. I say sliver cause all of the bigger towns gobbled up every square foot of land around and left ole Gravel Pit just a twenty mile wide section stuffed between the six towns around it. There was Dallas.

Big D had some pretty aggressive mayors in those days; Bob Thornton lived like a king and even built his own castle over by White Rock Lake. White Rock? It was one of two inner city lakes so the rich folks would have some place to go and cool off on hot summer days and being in Texas there were plenty of hot summer days, some hot fall days, a few hot winter days and oh yes, hot spring days.

On the west there was Arlington, named after Robert E Lee’s estate and at one time proud owner of a race track long shut down by the forces of Tarsus the Good. Arlington was a very progressive place, good for business and inviting to new folks. They had a mall, a community college and sold beer! Yeppers they were just over the county line in Tarrant County and seeing as how Dallas County was dry nothing would do but to put a wet city as close as Ft Worse’s city Council could get it. Made it nice for the locals, right after church on Sundays when the clock struck twelve you could meet all of your friends at the county line.

To the South was Cedar Hill, not much more than a fly speck until “Mean” Joe Greene retired and bought a house there. In my day it was a sleepy rural town with a feed store, a Grange hall and three stills. Shhhhhhhhh, no one was supposed to know about the stills.

In the north there was Irving, sort of a poor step-child to Dallas, but absolutely full of every good-looking, young girl in the whole county. There were two reasons for this, rents where eighty percent lower than in Dallas and Love Field Dallas’ air port was just across the river. What difference could that make you ask and well you should, air port, stewardesses, wink, nudge, hint-hint?

Remember this is my memory and it was way back in the fifties and sixties when all flight attendants were women and if a guy even thought about it he would get the tar kicked out of him and run out of town on a rail.

Okay so that was why Gravel Pit was so isolated, it was surrounded by more progressive, more exciting, more business oriented cities.

One other thing, Gravel Pit had twenty-seven fundamentalists churches, not conservative, Protestant churches mind you but fire-breathing, foot-stomping, tail-pinching, hell and damnation fundamentalist churches.

Okay, I’m getting there, and because there were twenty-seven fundamentalist churches in a town of thirty-five thousand you had to be a hard-shelled puritan to get elected. None of this weak-sister Mitt Romney stuff, he wouldn’t qualify as a Christian anyway, he’s a Mormon, but folks so severe in their beliefs that they made Oliver Cromwell look like a gay pride marcher in the May Day parade. If you don’t know who Oliver Cromwell is, there will be a short history seminar after today’s lesson.

And the Fire-breathingist of them all was Preacher Odom. He didn’t even approve of married couples sitting on the same bench. (No pews in his church cause that’s what Catholic heathens sat on.)

Okay, so finally here it comes; Preacher Odon got the City Council to vote in a ban on women wearing shorts of any kind in downtown. There was some confusion, first because it was hard to tell exactly what qualified as downtown and second because in hundred degree heat there was some question about an Eighth Amendment violation, you know the part about cruel and unusual punishment?

Yes, we can cover that in the seminar too. No it really isn’t part of the Fourth Amendment.

And so you see when the Nation needs some yahoo to come up with a really senseless law, like SOPA/PIPA or the Shorts Ordinance you can always count on a Texan to enact it!

That’s why we can all heave a sigh of relief that Rick Perry dropped out of the race and now all we have to fear is fear itself and the Congress.

And just in case you didn’t get yesterday’s post, let me repeat, the Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act depending on which loony bin you want to try to understand, House or Senate, is a death sentence for anyone wanting to use the Internet to promote their art or to just express an opinion.

Didja you write your Congressman? You can’t complain when Google goes dark if you didn’t let your opinion be known.

Excuse me; I think I hear the black helicopters circling the house so I’m off to grab my toothbrush. Who knows what kind of amenities they have in GITMO?