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Trader, Soldier, Whooping Crane
There's a doctor livin' in your town,
There's a lawyer and an indian too,
And neither doctor nor lawyer nor indian chief
Could love you any more than I do.
I've been thinking about this song for three days. Really.
It's sung by Betty Hutton, see, and the lyrics make it clear that the person she's singing it about is a female ... and that she's trying to warn all the men to stay away from her femme.
Okay, okay, I realize that the song may have been around long before Hutton, and that probably a male was the original vocalist. But have you ever seen what Betty Hutton looked like? Wouldn't she have made a great butch?
I have this bad habit. On days when I do nothing but write code - like today - all these random fragments of information swirl around in my brain. No, not story ideas; I've established that the code-writing section of my brain uses the same real estate as the fiction-writing section (although not in the same way). Just little ... things.
Like the story of the whooping cranes. But I'll come to that, I suppose. Serious Matters first.
There's a barrel of fish in the ocean,
There's a lot of little birds in the blue,
But neither fish nor fowl, says the wise old owl,
Could love you any more than I do!
I meant to write about the WTO protests a few days ago when they were happening - I still have some newspaper articles on the office floor I was planning on using for source material. But I decided to keep my crankiness to myself for once, and after the World War II comments (see below), I realized I was probably over my unfounded-opinions quota for the week anyway and I had been right to abstain.
But then Iain-Padraic wrote an aside about the Seattle fuss (literally - read the sidebar in the linked entry), and while his comment was absolutely wonderful, I must respectfully disagree with it, yea, even whilst I grin at his wit.
My knowledge of the WTO is mostly based on back numbers of The Economist - which of course is rabidly pro-trade, so I take it with a grain of salt - but as far as I can tell, the protestors had a grossly inflated idea of what the WTO is and what it can and can't do - as if it was some secret conspiracy of governments and Big Business.
The WTO doesn't exist to make the world safe for exploitation. It exists to settle trade disputes between nations. And - to the best of my knowledge - it has almost no teeth, very little enforcement mechanism. (Otherwise it wouldn't still be deadlocked over an international dispute on banana prices, which has nearly come to blows four times in a year without being settled.)
The WTO works mostly on the basis of giving the nations a place to sit down and talk about these things. It doesn't make rules; it makes handshake agreements (which are sometimes then not followed). Nations make trade rules; the WTO just suggests compromises.
In short, I find it rather benign. And I'm not interested in arguments that it's removing environmental controls and such; in some cases, it's creating them.
The US feels that Britain's stance on beef, for example, is rather paranoid (just wait until Creuzfeld-Jacob Syndrome has a major breakout in this country, though, and see how fast that changes). On the other hand, the EU doesn't understand how the US can countenance the idea of having genetically-enhanced foods in their supermarkets without special labelling. Britain has several factions that don't want to let in any modified foods at all - never mind that selective crossbreeding could be considered a "modification" by some standards ....
(pant, wheeze)
But ... I'm getting worked up, and I digress. Besides, the gene rant (which has changed a little since the last time you heard it) is so long that I should save it for another day.
Anyway, I'm not saying I think the WTO is perfect. There is another essay lurking in here (again, a topic for another day) about how Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is something of a failure, because it doesn't come with a built-in conscience ... so do not get the idea that I'm arguing for unfettered free enterprise, because I'm not.
Nor am I grousing about the right to protest. Protest all you like. But some of the protesters seemed like they were there more to raise a fuss than to make a point - there to be a part of some mass event, or perhaps to have a false sense of belonging to a cause, or maybe just to have an excuse to smash something.
I mean, really, busting up a Starbucks? Okay, granted that I dislike Starbucks intensely, in what way does this make a political statement about the WTO? (I am reminded of the sequence in Fight Club where one group has an assignment to "simultaneously destroy a large piece of public sculpture and a national coffee franchise.")
And what good is protesting the WTO at all? Go picket Monsanto or Raytheon. Heck, go picket a major seat of your national government. Picket a political convention if you like. But not the WTO. They're not policy makers. They're just straw men.
As shaky as I am on the WTO, I'm worse on World War II. Hold those phone calls, Regis Philbin! I am not ready for prime time.
I know quite a bit about Nazism (my dad was a fanatic on the subject), and I know some things about the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic because I was fascinated by U-boats when I was twelve or so.
Oh, and I know about the Enigma machine and other cryptography aspects of the war, because I used to be seriously into that kind of thing.
The rest of what I know is very general, and some of it is unreliable dogma. When I wrote my comments about the war, I got a number of emails correcting me on important points, all hinging on my comment that Britain basically fought alone against the Axis in 1941-42.
Several of the responses came from a correspondent who calls him/herself Hyde Park Weenie (I suspect that may be more of an FDR joke than a personal disparagement). Whoever this person is, I want him/her on my side next time I have to talk about war stuff. Being corrected has never been so fascinating!
I was going to paraphrase my correspondents, but their words are too good.
J. Theodor was one of several Aussie and Canadian readers to remind me that their nations didn't just sit around:
Britain was most certainly not the only Allied force by 1941-42 - both Canada and Australia declared war in the fall of 1939, and both countries had higher per capita casualty rates than the U.S. did at any point during the conflict.
And no telling me that they count as part of Britain because they were part of the Commonwealth; both countries had to ratify by parliament. I don't mean to be snippy, but Americans always overlook the Canuck and Aussie contribution - my high school in Toronto lost several graduating classes to the war. It really irritates me.
I suggested in an email that the Russians were primarily waiting for Hitler to overextend himself instead of fighting. Hyde Park Weenie disabused me of that:
The Soviets did not sit around and exploit the winter: they fought tooth and nail. They would have been better off if they had followed the "sit-on-your-duff and let the enemy exhaust himself" strategy. The course they followed might have worked if they had had leadership worth a damn, and if Stalin hadn't interfered with operations the way he did.
They may have been badly led, but they did fight. [...] Later on, the Soviets would mock the British for their timid approach to fighting the Germans - with some justice.
I can't even say that the U.S. was uninvolved in '41-42 and be strictly correct, for while we had not declared war, we were apparently kicking the Germans covertly every chance we could get - something I'd have known from my U-boat reading, if only I didn't have such a hard time with chronology. I didn't think some of the things Hyde Park Weenie mentions here happened until a year or so later:
The Germans bent over backwards to avoid attacking American shipping. We knew this fact, and took advantage of it it in several devious ways. Hitler at that time wanted to avoid war with the US (making his later decision to declare war on the US even more bizarre). US ships passed intelligence, depth-charged U-Boats, participated in convoys, and, in general, were participants in the naval war.
[...]
We didn't have much to do in 1941 except Lend-Lease and the Quasi-War, but 1942 was a big year for us: the Coral Sea, Midway, the first part of Guadacanal ... and our invasion of North Africa.
So, there is officially egg on my face. And now I want to read a couple of books on the history of the war, because it's obvious I'm missing a few facts.
No, no, no, it couldn't be true,
That anyone else could love you like I do!
I'm gonna warn all the Deadeye Dicks
That you're the chick with the slickest tricks
And every tick of my ticker ticks
For you ...
Oh, yes, the whooping cranes.
I got this from an interesting little book called How Did They Do That? It's a collection of historical anecdotes and other factoids, disguised as a question-and-answer book. The question being answered here is "How did the whooping crane learn to reproduce in captivity?" ... and one part of the answer is: by the efforts of man named George Archibald, who had a lot of intelligence and not much concern for personal dignity.
Archibald, you see, learned and mastered the mating dance of the whooping crane. He used this skill on a female crane named Tex, who had developed an unhealthy attachment to humans rather than males of her own species, having been raised by people.
For three springs, Archibald danced this dance with Tex, jumping up and down and bending at the knees, holding his arms outstretched like wings, picking up grass and tossing it into the air - and each time Tex responded, and was artificially inseminated by assistants as soon as she lifted her tail at the (pardon the phrase) climax of the dance.
Unfortunately (and as is sadly typical), though Tex produced an egg each of those years, none of the three eggs was viable, for various reasons. The fourth year, Archibald was unavailable to do the dance ... and that is when Tex's keepers learned that she would not dance with anyone else but him.
Whooping cranes mate for life.
I can't decide if this is touching, funny, sad, or all of the above.
In 1982 Archibald was able to dance again, and Tex eventually had a healthy chick as a result. Which is good, because love stories should have happy endings.
Tell the doctor to stick to his practice,
Tell the lawyer to settle his case,
Send the indian chief and his tomahawk
Back to Little Rain-in-the-Face!
I'm going to dream about Betty Hutton, I just know it.
© Columbine
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Late-Breaking News: Okay, so after I posted this I went back to add a Betty Hutton link. Shoulda done that first, eh? From the site I learned that not only is Hutton still alive, but that "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" is from the movie Stork Club. However, when I looked up the plot of the film (which is basically, "Will the Funny Girl" - Hutton - "find a Good Man?") I found nothing to explain the lesbian overtones in this song, so a little mystery remains.
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