Taking Chance

 

Memorial Day reminds us of sacrifice and so today would be the perfect day to watch this  great movie, “Taking Chance”.

Here’s the trailer: Taking Chance trailer

A true story about a young man Chance Phelps who died much too young and the Marine who volunteers to escort the body back home to Wyoming for burial. 

It began as a wonderful and touching human interest story “Taking Chance Home” written by LtCol Michael Strobl USMC, posted at a military blog that I read regularly back in 2004 called blackfive.net.

I saw “Taking Chance” upon its release in 2009 and then again on Saturday and it has lost none of its emotional power.

There were many movies made about our adventures and mis-adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan but most were manipulative and exploited death to hammer home political points. That’s gross.

But if you like raw and emotionally powerful stories told well, about honoring sacrifice, with characters you quickly grow to like and respect, you’ll not do better than this one.

A scene that did not make it into the movie but is excellent nonetheless.

PFC Chance Phelps was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and promoted to Lance Corporal.

Here’s the real Lt Col Strobl discussing the making of the movie.

Free on HBO Max and you can rent it on Amazon. 

Paying Tribute

The Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a solemn and important ritual and one of the few “must see” events in my life, and that’s been true for over 50 years since I saw it for the very first time as a kid age 10-11.

One of my favorite podcasts, The American Story, explains why it matters in this week’s excellent episode Known But to God. 

My advice: take 6 minutes out of your life to nourish your soul. You’ll be glad you did.

This Week in 1954: Supreme Court Overturns Its Own Disastrous Decision

May 17, 1954 was the day that Brown vs. Board of Education ended “federal tolerance of racial segregation".

Ironically, it was issued one day shy of the anniversary of the historically awful “Plessy vs. Ferguson” 1896 decision that it overturned..

All during the post-Civil War era there was exactly one institution with both the power and the duty to force change on Southern states: the federal government. 

All three branches had both the power and the duty: to pass laws, to enforce them, and to uphold them. 

But empirical evidence shows us that the federal government was either a) okay with entrenched Southern institutional racism, or b) too powerless and afraid to do anything about it.

Blame Southerners and their culture, of course. It was their system, they built it, and they own it. 

But the federal government was empowered to fix it, as a basic question of Constitutionally-guaranteed human rights, and for whatever reason did not, and must not escape accountability.

Reminder: It’s Good to be Alive

 

Jason Gray is here to remind us of this important fact.

Gratitude

We all need a reminder about that sometimes. 

So right here right now
While the Sun is shining down
I wanna live
Like there’s no tomorrow
Love
Like I’m on borrowed time
It’s good to be alive

We are always living and loving on borrowed time, we just don’t realize it.

One of the Greatest Movies You’ve Never Seen: “Secondhand Lions”

Secondhand Lions from 2003. Here is the trailer.

Sometimes you watch some movie you’ve never heard of and wonder why it isn’t much more widely known and admired, this is one of those.

Set in the early 60s, it stars both Michael Caine and Robert Duvall as a couple of crazy old (and apparently rich) uncles who take in a young boy relative (played by Haley Joel Osment) — whose mother manipulates and abandons him — and teach him what being a man is really all about: courage, honor, sacrifice, and virtue.

The story is timeless and classic — it feels like it was lifted straight from the 1950s — and you grow to like the characters you’re supposed to like and dislike those you’re not. 

The uncles have led quite the adventurous life, if we can believe all their stories — we’re never quite sure, and various people float rumors about their past and where they got their cash, but then we slowly realize it doesn’t really matter if a story is strictly 100% true or not if it inspires people and captures their imaginations and teaches them about what they should aim for and what is important in life.

Family-friendly, with life lessons and humor and larger-than-life characters. Did I mention that Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are in it?

Quote from the Robert Duvall character “Hub”: 

"Sometimes, the things that may or may not be true, are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are good, that honor, courage and virtue mean everything, that power and money, money and power mean nothing, that good always triumphs over evil, … that love … true love never dies."

Here’s that scene.

A wonderful tale, masterfully told, with excellent acting all around, and a real throwback to when movies instilled valuable life lessons.

It’s available to buy or rent on YouTube and Amazon along with other ways to watch it, and does play on cable occasionally (that’s how I first saw it about 10 years ago).

Links

• Wikipedia 
• IMDB
• YouTube

170 Years Ago This Week: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is Published, Fueling the Abolitionist Movement

 

And becomes the best-selling book of the 19th century in the U.S. (besides the Bible).

You can read the summary of the plot here — but far more interesting historically is the impact it had.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote it in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which threw gas on the fire, exacerbating a long-running sore point between free and slave states — how much are people in free states obligated to help return escaped slaves to their owners? How legally liable can they be? It quickly turns into a thorny question with conflicts between states, and between federal and state law.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin resonated with the public because it told a dramatic story about contemporary moral struggles with a noble Christian slave protagonist, and in telling that story made a convincing case that slavery was fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.

The book is best understood not as an isolated incident but as part of the abolitionist movement started in the 1700s in both the Colonies and Britain and was fueled by two major forces, the Enlightenment and Christianity — and it directly opposed the very big business that the slave trade had become since the 1500s. 

The slave trade was very big business not just for the British but for the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spaniards in the West Indies, South America, and United States. It was global, and a key piece of colonial power.

The entire economies in many of these places depended on slavery and the slave trade — this was well before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century that would transform every modern economy in the world. This means that in addition to moral questions around slavery and the slave trade there were very powerful economic interests with little incentive to do away with it. 

The British were the leading edge of the abolitionist movement and the first to abolish the slave trade (1807) and then the practice itself (1833). Prominent figures were James Oglethorpe, William Wilberforce, and several other Brits.

Oglethorpe was a British soldier and MP who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732 (as a place to send “the unemployed and the unemployable”) and outlawed slavery there for a time from 1735 to 1750.

Wilberforce was a British MP who, after becoming an Evangelical Christian in 1785 and the main abolitionist in Parliament, was a prime driver behind the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and then the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in Parliament. 

But there’s so much more and I encourage clicking one or more of the links below.

Somehow the British, at one time the largest slaveholders in the world, get little recognition for their role in abolishing slavery throughout their lands. They also avoided fighting a Civil War over it, probably because it was more of a Colonialism issue than an internal regional conflict.

More on the U.S. role in the abolitionist movement soon. 

Recommended listening: Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast in general and his most recent episode on the Atlantic slave trade, it’s fascinating and insightful, as always. I learned a lot and I’m only halfway through (it’s nearly 6 hours in length, so you have to break it into consumable chunks).

Recommended video for context:

Links:

• https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uncle-toms-cabin-is-published
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Oglethorpe
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833

 

On This Day 463 Years Ago

The Elizabethan Age begins (1558)

... the start of the last 45 years of the House of Tudor rule from 1485 - 1603 (Henry VII and VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth II). 

I am certainly no expert on the history of Britain or Kings and Queens or any of that, but reading about it sure does inspire various type of thoughts, including:

• can you believe this shit?!
• why so much incest and deal-making and arranged marriages in European royal families?
• these people are absolute barbarians
• I cannot believe how entwined the Pope was with local Kings and Queens
• so that’s why the Pilgrims came to America in 1620
• plus many more

Start with the Tudor period and go from there ... that’s what I did, and hoo boy ... 

Henry VIII

The decades after Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in 1519 were extremely tumultuous and that combined with the whimsical cult-of-personality authoritarian government in England (and throughout Europe) led to a battle over the doctrine of the new Church of England — created at the whim of Henry VIII over an annulment he wanted but could not have — that see-sawed back and forth from one King or Queen to the next, Catholic doctrine under this one, Protestant under that one. 

Worship the wrong doctrine? Punishable by death. 

It’s impossible to overstate how chaotic, violent, and out of control it was for the next nearly 200 years. Wikipedia says this about that period known as the English Reformation.

The Reformation transformed English religion during the Tudor period. The five sovereigns, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I had entirely different approaches, with Henry VIII replacing the pope as the head of the Church of England but maintaining Catholic doctrines, Edward imposing a very strict Protestantism, Mary attempting to reinstate Catholicism, and Elizabeth arriving at a compromise position that defined the not-quite-Protestant Church of England. It began with the insistent demands of Henry VIII for an annulment of his marriage that Pope Clement VII refused to grant.

About that annulment for Henry VIII, we should note two things: (1) as King, he was obsessed with producing an heir to the throne, and (2) his marriage to Catherine — his brother Arthur’s widow — in 1509 lasted nearly 24 years in total and resulted in four stillborn children, one son Henry who died aged just 7 weeks, and a daughter Mary (who later became Queen in 1553).

The Pope refused, of course, and the pursuit of this annulment dragged on for a few years until 1532, by which time Henry had kicked Catherine to the curb and installed Anne Boleyne (an assistant to Catherine, and whose sister Mary he had been having an affair with). Anne bore him a daughter Elizabeth in 1533 (the Queen Elizabeth noted above) but no sons and so of course was beheaded in 1536 for incest and treason. So he married Jane Seymour, who had been a lady-in-waiting for Queen Anne, in 1837. She did bear the son he had been waiting for, Edward, who became King at age 9 upon his father’s death and only lived until age 15. 

In essence he decided to uproot the entire English religious structure and induce violence and chaos for the next 200 years by breaking completely away from the Pope and starting a new Church of England, with doctrine (and laws) that switched with the whims of whoever happened to be sovereign leader at the time... all because Henry and Catherine never produced a male heir to the throne. When Henry’s third bride finally did produce a male heir, Edward, he only lived until age 15. 

You can easily see why the Pilgrims were motivated to get the hell out of there.

Henry VIII basically charted a new course for England from a Catholic country under the Vatican’s thumb to a Protestant and independent one with more power and revenue (plus an extremely powerful Royal Navy, also his idea). As it says in this longer article all about the English Reformation:

The break with Rome gave Henry VIII power to administer the English Church, tax it, appoint its officials, and control its laws.

This is exactly what eventually drove the movement that became the American Revolution.

The Tudor period is noteworthy for many other well-known figures and events from history, including William Shakespeare and the rise of the Royal Navy (under Henry VIII) which led to the British Empire stretching across the planet over the next 400 years. 

Dave Chappelle, Modern Day Philosopher

When Comedians Push Back

When I see leadership like this against the authoritarian idiocy that is cancel culture, part of me truly wishes comedians had an official role in government — with the force of law — as Speech Police. 

Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Burr, John Cleese and more on Cancel Culture:

There should be no need for such a thing, of course — but since we already have an unelected de facto Speech Police in the form of the many people dividing words and thoughts into categories they helpfully designate as Approved and Unapproved, serving as judge, jury, and executioner — the only people I trust to lead us right now are comedians.

And no, I’m not kidding. What other group of people insists on the freedom to criticize everyone? Whose livelihood depends on it? Whose values are consistent with the intent of our Bill of Rights, and understand that the only way to counter speech you don’t like is more speech?

Comedians, that’s who. Are there others? I literally cannot think of anyone else.

John Cleese says in this video that “all comedy is critical” and he’s exactly right. It’s part of the deal and assumes the audience is tough enough to laugh at themselves. Societies that adopt “that’s not funny” as their official motto are on the road to authoritarianism. 

Comedians are the canary in the coal mine for freedom of expression, and today that trend is not up. 

Americans are far too casual with their hard-won freedoms — they don’t appreciate them enough or understand what life would be like without them. The best time to recognize and respond to threats is yesterday, and the next best time is right now.