I did a bit of Christmas shopping yesterday in Covent Garden market. They have a big Christmas tree there – (and yes, it’s called a Christmas tree) – and next to it is Santa’s Grotto.
Santa’s Grotto is where little kids go to see Santa in the UK, there are grottos in stores, malls, markets, etc.
I just don’t understand why they think Santa lives in a cave. Santa lives here.
Andrew Sullivan writes:
“Should we feel sorry for Condi Rice? She wasn’t exactly the architect of the torture policies of the current administration, but she sure hasn’t stopped them.”
Hm, I find this an interesting question. I find the question of Dr Rice’s morality – or lack of it – strangely fascinating. It’s easy to peg Rumsfeld and Cheney as gleefully* malevolent people who do bad just for the sheer joyful fun of it, and Bush as an arrogant, nasty little spoiled brat pretending to be a good old boy. Powell was an intelligent, over-cautious and naturally rather weak (for a soldier) man whose adherence to basic norms of decency brought him into frequent conflict with Cheney/Rumsfeld, Rice acting as something of a mediator between the two. But I find Rice harder to peg. She’s smart enough to know that torturing people may be fun, but is poor politics. She has done a consistently competent job as Sec of State, though perhaps that’s only noteworthy because everyone else in the administration seems to fall so far short of that standard – we’re at a stage where “American meets foreign leaders, no diplomatic disaster” has itself become noteworthy news. It’s hard to tell – I don’t think Rice approves of Rumsfeld/Cheney’s antics, but there’ no sign she disapproves of them on moral grounds, either. Yet if she did disapprove, she might not show it – that would be “disloyalty”, the only sin Bush recognises, and certainly Rice has always been 100% loyal. Because of this, she has been a better Sec of State than Powell, I think. I don’t know if she is a good person. I don’t think she’s exactly a bad person, in the sense that Rumsfeld/Cheney are bad, but it may be that she is largely amoral. There are worse people to be running the country than amoral pragmatists IMO – misguided idealists can be a lot worse. I suspect that she might make rather a good President – certainly much better than Bush – but that she is unlikely to run, because as a candidate a black woman would lose some of the Republican base, and I don’t think Condi Rice would attract many defectors from the Democrats, black or white. I might be tempted to vote for her, but I don’t get a vote, and I think the Vol prefers Hillary Clinton. And maybe she’s right.
I dunno.
*OK, maybe calling Cheney ‘gleeful’ isn’t quite right… but you’ve got to have seen that smug grin on Rumsfeld’s face as he discusses (eg) how there’s just not enough cash in the kitty to get vehicular armour for the Tennessee National Guard.
Last week my grandfather related how he got some Nazi loot and this week the war ends…rather abruptly. Maybe he just got tired of talking about it. But not to worry, there’s loads more of his life growing up in Wilson County, TN his time at UT and in Lawrenceburg, etc.
Finally the war got over and we wound up in Salzburg, we went through the mountains, the Austrian Alps the redoubt area, but they had guns set up supposedly to stop us when we went through there, but they didn’t shoot at us or do anything. And we wound up in Salzburg and stayed there a pretty good while, stayed in a little old hotel where the people did the cooking and all we had to do was get the food there, all I had to do was get it there.
And then after a while they decided they were gonna move and they moved us to Castle (?) Germany, and that was the town that the British bombed in retaliation for 2the bombing of Plymouth and Coventry and it was pitiful what they did to that town. But we stayed there for a little while and while we were there they decided that they were gonna move us again and they moved us down to Esviege (?) and that was right on the border where the Americans and the Russians came together and while we were at Esviege I taught school. I taught a little agriculture and I taught a little history and I taught _______ people and any people who couldn’t read and write how to read.
But that didn’t go on long til we got a notice that if you want to go to school in England to fill out a form and I filled one out and said I want to go to school some more. And I don’t where, not Stonehenge, but some Henge there was a military school close to London that’s where I was sent to, and I studied, I don’t know what I studied, not much of anything to tell you the truth. But I got passes and I went to London for several things and I went to Edinburgh. I saw the Queen, the present Queen, and her sister. Just rambled around over the countryside and then school was out and they shipped us back then to Stuttgart in Germany and we stayed there a while and then they decided we were going home. They sent us to a port of debarkation, I guess it was and caught a little old Liberty Ship and wound up in Camp Bradebury (?) Indiana and that’s where I was discharged. And that’s the end of my story.
Read the first post
Read the previous post
Go to the granddad blogging portal page
Technorati tags: oral history, WWII, history
The Vol Abroad 