Letter from Seoul - 6
Saddle bronc rider - Oklahoma rodeo
[–––aiming for the fences–––]
Once Upon a Time in St. Louis (with the opening strains of a faux Sergio Leone soundtrack), this specific calendar day was set aside to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. This was a state holiday across the Mississippi River in Illinois, but was only nominally regarded in Missouri – a slave-holding state up until the Confederacy collapsed with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant on April 9, 1865. No one could have known that Lincoln would be shot dead at close-range in his private balcony seat at Ford’s Theatre just six days later.
Missouri was one of four slave-holding border states that remained in the Union. This was not because of any pro-Union sentiment, but because Lincoln either sent troops to places like St. Louis to secure federal armaments at Jefferson Barracks, or troops surrounded the state seats of government in Maryland and Delaware to prevent legislators from voting for secession. In some cases, Lincoln simply had pro-Confederate politicians jailed indefinitely without charges.
“Boss,” asked General Winfield Scott, hero of the American-Mexican War (1846-1848), when the U.S. stole half of our neighboring country (“Don’t Cry for Me, Ukraine”), now too fat to mount a horse, “you want us put these bad boys on the Moscow Express?”
“Give them a ride on Pinochet Air,” Lincoln said.
“But airplanes haven’t been invented yet. And who is fuckface Pinochet?”
“If they move, shoot them,” Lincoln said.
“Habeas corpus,” Lincoln explained to his lead general, “we ain’t got no habeas corpus. We don’t need no habeas corpus. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ habeas corpus.”
Known as Honest Abe, it is estimated that Lincoln imprisoned as many as 38,000 people during the four-year Civil War. Yet desperate times call for desperate measures.
And so the wealthy white men of Missouri who believed in the right to own black people went right on whipping their male slaves and raping the slave women until Lee gave up and surrendered on April 9, 1865.
“Where have you gone, Honest Abe?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo, woo, woo
What's that you say?
Honest Abe was gunned down
Next to his wife at Ford’s Theatre
And has gone away
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey.”
Yet a century later, February 12th was a holiday in St. Louis to celebrate Honest Abe’s birthday, because Illinois was known as The Land of Lincoln. It's still known that way.
For that day, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Pulitzer-owned newspaper (Joseph Pulitzer, III was the publisher) featured some of my favorite ads: “Women’s lingerie, half-off.”
* * *
Americans as Expats, and A Day with Alice Greenough Orr
The genuine American friends in my life have dwindled to two or three now. One is young enough to be my daughter, born and raised in Montana. We taught at the same high school in Yokosuka. She and her husband – also a teacher, moved on to Spain. Sookyung and I traveled to Seville in 2018 for a visit that coincided with the Semana Santa Festival.
That was over five-years ago, and now the family – including a daughter in her first year of high school, are back in Montana. Big Sky Country is very conservative and the cowboy culture is the bedrock of the state.
On June 25, 1876 – near enough to July Fourth, and the Centennial of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, slaughtered Lt. Colonel George Custer and 268 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn, a river in south-central Montana
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led a combined force of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. There were no U.S. Army survivors, and later accounts of the Native American victory tell a tale of unimaginable horror and butchery that exceeds depravity. Allegedly, the tribal women smashed the skulls and jaws of the decapitated soldiers in the chance of finding gold teeth. If none were to be found, no matter.
In July of 1979, I met with Alice Greenough Orr (1902-1995) in Red Lodge. At the time I was the editor of the weekly Carbon County News, and Alice was 77-years-old. She was part of Red Lodge royalty, a member of the famed Greenough rodeo family. This doesn’t mean much outside the rodeo world, but she was the real deal. A member of The National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Alice was a four-time women’s world saddle bronc champion.
Ben Greenough, her father, was a New York City boy from Brooklyn who left home at age 17, and arrived penniless in Billings, Montana during 1886. He quickly found a job cutting wood at a whorehouse for Martha Jane Canary – better known as Calamity Jane. The Hollywood film Calamity Jane (1953) is a musical with Doris Day and Howard Keel. It is pure laugh-out-loud rubbish.
Calamity Jane was not easy on the eyes, and allegedly looked the part of a whore way past her shelf life who either becomes a madam, or a Happy Ending Queen in a jerk-off joint. Most of the time Calamity Jane was in-and-out of Montana county jails for being broke, destitute, a vagrant. In other words, a genuine loser.
My brief tenure (less than six months) as the Sports Editor of The Livingston Enterprise in south-central Montana ended abruptly when I was fired for a colorful feature on a women’s pool tournament at Calamity Jane’s Bar in April, 1978. The word “embellishment” is more accurate than “colorful.” Yet it was not my destiny to be a sports editor. In her last years, Calamity Jane called Livingston home and alternated between operating a whorehouse, being in the Park County jail, and living as a pauper in the county’s Poor House. Despite this shabby resume, there was that namesake bar in Livingston and the Doris Day musical from the early 1950s.
As the young Ben Greenough advanced his worldly education working in Calamity Jane’s Billings whorehouse, he became dubbed “Packsaddle Ben,” by “Liver-eaten” Johnson, so named for eating the liver of Crow Indians, some of whom killed his wife. Robert Redford starred as Jeremiah Johnson (1972), a film loosely based on the Montana mountain man.
Eventually, Johnson became a bit more conventional and took the role of sheriff in Red Lodge during his later years. As a result, Ben Greenough shifted to Red Lodge and this is where he distinguished himself as a rodeo bronc rider.
Alice told me all this and more that afternoon in 1979. She revealed how her father had gone to the battlefield at Little Bighorn in the early 1900s, which was not designated a historical site until 1991. Alice explained how her father still found remnants of the battle: spent bullet casings, busted rifle stock and busted teeth, rocks still stained with blood.
Yet words were not necessary to convey Alice’s respect for the past, for history, for honoring what has come before – as long as we can improve as a result. Alice’s quiet dignity spoke volumes. She did not have to tell me who she was and what was important to her. Alice’s character was revelation enough. I’ve always thought of her as what I love so much about America – especially those quietly resilient people from Big Sky Country.
* * *
Yet now Montana is Trump Country.
I took very serious notice when my friend in Missoula wrote the other day: “I was wondering if maybe we should liquidate our accounts if Trump gets re-elected. I’m sort of making an exit plan. I am still in disbelief that there are that many stupid people out there. I’m with you. I don't recognize this country. I feel mildly bewildered on a daily basis. I keep thinking it must just be a bad dream.”
And then, the very same day, a longtime friend who retired as a District School Superintendent from Oklahoma – also solid Trump Country, wrote me: “Fascism is at our doorstep, and half the country supports it “… for they know not what they do…” at least the rubes don’t. The radical right power structure knows exactly what they are doing.
I did a bad job planning financially for retirement. I thought I was bulletproof, until age proved me wrong. However, if I completely sold out here, we could probably live very comfortably in Panama, or Mexico, given Social Security (the national pension) staying intact.
I guess we’ll know more in a little less than a year.
Just thinking that my wife might be a good prospect for teaching English in Mexico. She can’t speak a word of Spanish, but…
We are flying to Puerto Vallarta in May. We are going to check out the prospects at Lake Chapala, just inland about 2.5 hours from the Pacific coast. It has a large expat community.
This fucking winter weather is almost intolerable these days, as are the dog days of summer. I’m not as tough as I once was … so a year-round moderate climate is very appealing.”
By the way, Fredrich von Trump (1869-1918) the German-born American immigrant, made his initial fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory of Canada for the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-1899.
* * *
The irony of Americans pursuing an expat life in Mexico.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomes all new residents to The Lone Star State – as long as they are American-born white people.
Otherwise, Texas is very much a Red State.
Just ask the Mexican woman and her two young children who drowned last Friday in the Rio Grande after Texas soldiers prevented Border Patrol officers from entering Shelby Park, the area where migrants were crossing.
Abbott today insisted that the Mexican mother and her two children were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping.
The Texas Governor tried to argue that the deaths of the migrants were not his fault but rather Biden’s because that’s what insurrectionist and sex offender Donald Trump would say
The Abominable Gregg Abbott is a loathsome moral pygmy, but too dumb to lay down on the side of I-35 outside of Austin and let the vultures complete the cycle of life.
I have moved a lot of my money to Chase Bank, because it is the largest in the U.S. - with nearly 4,500 branch banks. Of course the bank is corrupt and even put a big stack of cash on the table to appease victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long pedophile habits. Probably up until the day Epstein was found dangling at the end of a bed sheet tied to a light fixture in his Manhattan jail cell, he was a VIP Chase Bank client.
As the adage goes: shit happens.
Even Erdogan, Jinping, Orban and Putin need a bank.
The 67-year-old Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. He has a net worth of $1.6 billion, and pocketed $13 million this past year as a bonus. Sure, why not?
This past week at the worthless World Economic Wanker’s Forum in Davos, the JP Morgan Chase CEO briefly defiled himself in public with a lukewarm endorsement of sex offender Donald Trump for President. Fascism playbook 101: lavish praise on the politically ascending sociopath in hopes of winning favor for more ruthless business operations. It’s working for Trump, just as it did for Mussolini, Hitler and Franco in the last century.
I made my exit from the United States of Amnesia over 20-years-ago. Yet China’s rise as a world power with imperial intentions did not seem possible in 2002.
The Winds of War grow stronger every day – especially in the corridor of Ukraine to the north, and Yemen to the south – with Bibi’s genocide in the middle.
Iran is the sick arsonist, lighting matches and tossing them toward Yemen, Syria, Iraq and now Pakistan – either overtly or through well-funded proxy militias. Let them drink from lakes of wine and fuck the celestial virgins at Allah’s pleasure.
I’m sure my younger friend in Montana will stay in Missoula, and ride things out. Her husband, a fine fellow, once lived in Alaska. The couple is accustomed to nine months of winter with temperatures as low as -30C. It would make sense for them to step across the border into Canada, and shift to Vancouver on the coast.
My friend from Oklahoma – my one-time principal before I joined the circus known as DoDEA, and began my 15-year world tour as a teacher on the military bases of the American Empire, might actually opt for Chapala in Jalisco, where Guadalajara is located. It’s a 2.40-hour flight from Dallas, with about another hour to drop down from Tulsa.
* * *
Chapulhuacan, Jose Maldonado and E.W. Marland
I’m not sure why anyone would really be interested in my family history in Old Mexico. However, if you note the enclosed Google maps of Central Mexico, with a straight line from Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast-to-the Gulf of Mexico, this was part of the old Aztec Empire, and Nahuatul place names are still in use – either as phonetic Spanish or a bi-lingual conjugation.
Two popular expat communities along the north shore of Lake Chapala, south of Guadalajara, are … Chapala and Aijic. Slightly north of Aijic, on the way to Guadalajara, is Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos.
As my father’s village, Chapulhuacan, translates from the Nahuatl as “valley of the grasshoppers,” Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos seems to translate as “valley of the membrillos,” and membrillos into Spanish means quinces – an Asian fruit similar to an orange.
When I first went to Chapulhuacan in the summer of 1993, I had been in contact with Padre Humberto Bejarano Hernandez, through a local resident in my Oklahoma town, a native of Guanajuato – the state just west of Hidalgo where my father lived. What were the chances?
Thirty-years ago or so, Jose Maldonado was an engineer for Conoco – one of the big oil companies in Oklahoma. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon is set in Osage County, across the Arkansas River from where I lived. I’m sure I mentioned this in my previous letter. I haven’t seen the film – yet, but it likely makes mention of the Phillips 66 Oil Company. If not, I’m surprised.
In 1917, Frank and Lee Phillips started the Phillips Oil Company – better known as Phillips 66, a nod to U.S. Highway 66 … Route 66, the highway that ran from Chicago-to-LA.
“Get your kicks,
on Route 66.”
The Joad Family took this road to flee the hellscape of the Dust Bowl era in Oklahoma and reach the Promised Land of California’s Imperial Valley in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states … Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history. Oklahoma alone lost nearly 400,000 people to California.
Jose Maldonado gave me his time and valuable advice about what I might expect on a first-time trip to Chapulhuacan in the old Aztec Empire. The trip south along the Pan-American Highway from Nuevo Laredo across the Texas border was – at best, a 14-hour one-way trip on the Flecha Roja (Red Arrow) bus. My Spanish is limited to salutations, menu items and obscenities.
While the Phillips brothers started their oil company in Bartlesville, Ernest Whitworth Marland created his own company in Ponca City. Long before Maldonado began his career in the oil industry, E.W. Marland’s oil company lost money and was absorbed by Conoco – an acronym for the Continental Oil Company.
Marland’s story is more than worthy of a Hollywood film.
Marland and his wife, Virginia, had no children. To share their wealth and help her sister Margaret Roberts and her family, in 1916 they adopted their two children, George and Lydie, who were 19 and 16-years-old.
The Marlands sent their adopted children to private schools and gave them other advantages. During this time, they also commissioned a large Italianate mansion, the “Palace on the Prairie,” designed by architect John Duncan Forsyth.
Better known as the Marland Mansion, it was still under construction when Lydie's adoptive mother, Virginia Marland, died on June 6, 1926.
Two years after Virginia's death, Marland had Lydie's adoption annulled and married her on July 14, 1928. He was 54-years-old, and his former adopted daughter was 28.
Calling Woody Allen. Anyone home?
Once considered one of the world’s richest men, by the time Marland married his adopted daughter, he had squandered two fortunes and was way down on his luck. What’s a failed businessman with dubious morals to do?
Calling Donald Trump. Anyone home?
Marland became a stooge for the Democratic Party financial elite and went onto a brief political career, serving first as a U.S. Representative in Congress – already a well-established whorehouse, where there is nothing new under the sun.
Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz, George Santos, Lauren “Handjob” Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are simply the newest members of a terminal conga line of fucktards, slut puppies and dunk tank clowns.
Two years later, Marland went to Oklahoma City as the state governor – with Lydie, his former daughter/current wife, as his First Lady
A friendly reminder: Oklahoma has always been a Bible Belt state. “Hey, y’all. We surely love Jesus … on Sunday morning.”
After his only gubernatorial term, Marland had the Reverse Midas Touch and was flat broke. He and Lydie returned to Ponca City and lived in the chauffeur's cottage of their former mansion.
God works in mysterious ways, and the one-time oil tycoon sold the big house and grounds to some Carmelite priests in Mexico who had enough money to buy a mansion in America.
The universal mantra of all religious charlatans:
“God is good, God is great
Pass that money here,
before it’s too late.”
After playing “Let’s Make a Deal” with the Catholic outfit in Mexico, Marland probably drank heavily and fatigued himself as an anemic wanker.
In a smart career move, he died in 1941.
Lydie, his former daughter, loving second wife and now widow, became a passenger on the train to nowhere as a recluse in the chauffeur's cottage. For years, Lydie drifted in the current of ordinary madness and then vanished from Oklahoma one day in 1953.
Lydie’s whereabouts for the next 22-years remain mostly a mystery. Because she was a nationally known figure, newspapers reported when she was discovered working as a hotel maid in Independence, Missouri.
Later Lydie was recognized in a New York City breadline. In 1967, she was marching in an anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., and next was identified in San Francisco.
In 1975, a Ponca City lawyer located Lydie in Kansas City and financed her return to the Marland Mansion. She moved right back into the chauffeur's cottage and lived there until her death on July 25, 1987.
During Lydie’s last years, there were stories of an occasional faint light from one of the second-floor bedrooms of the mansion. The entire estate had been purchased by the city as both a historical site and a tourist attraction. Charles Hepler, the Director of the Marland Mansion in the early 1980s, speculated that there was an underground tunnel that linked the chauffeur's cottage with the mansion, and Lydie made nocturnal visits to the home where she spent the happier years of her life.
By the time Jose Maldonado retired from Conoco, the company had entered into partnership with Phillips Oil to form ConocoPhillips in 2002, considered the third largest oil company in America, with headquarters in the Energy Corridor of Houston.
The company, based on what both Marland and the Phillips brothers started more than a century ago, is now a multinational corporation engaged in hydrocarbon exploration and production.
* * *
When I first went to that old Aztec village, a young girl named Mirya was visiting her aunt, who lived across the street from the church. Mirya’s mother had left the village long ago and settled in LA. Mirya was born in LA and spoke both English and Spanish. In 1993, she was in her early 20s. Her arrival in Chapulhuacan had nothing to do with me. To say she was my La Malinche is a huge exaggeration … and yet she was my translator.
With the exception of photo 7, all are from my Oklahoma period. More specifically, the biker-themed photos are from Pawhuska in the late 1980s. Pawhuska is the county seat for Osage County. The American model of governance follows the pattern of federal, state and county levels, with the last example a collection point for birth, marriage, divorce, death records and property deeds. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is grounded in the history of Osage County during the Oklahoma Oil Boom years (the 1920s) - and so Pawhuska figures prominently in the film. I know this without watching the film. During this same time, E.W. Marland was operating in Ponca City, across the line in Kay County, unapologetic about his degenerate relationship with his adopted daughter/un-adopted daughter and soon wife.
Photo 1 is among a series of advertising photos for Bandy’s an exclusive dress shop owned by Phil Bandy in Ponca City. The series featured his affluent female clients, typically married to the movers and shakers of found on the board of directors of this-or-that bank, and always at the country club. For a time, I could pretend that I was really working for French Vogue, instead of another lame small-town newspaper.
Photo 2 features Henry, a mixed Beagle from my Montana period in the late 1970s. He is still the canine love of my life, a solid companion and just a genuine gift. The only resurrection that interests me are people and dogs – mostly dogs, who made life worth living. This is from a make-shift studio I created at the newspaper, with a two-light set-up: key and fill. I used a Yashica medium-format camera at f11.
Starting with the biker series – Photo 3,4,5,6 – at Pawhuska, it was a Saturday, and later that night, there was an amateur strip tease with the women usually wearing nothing, the young children around the stage. The pseudo-incentive for exhibitionism was a hatful of money collected earlier in the day when it was passed around the crowd. In those days, Easy Rider magazine paid $30 per photograph; not bad for the late 1980s. Since I was going to make some money off the mother-and-daughter duo 3, I sent them copies. This was in late May, during Memorial Day Weekend – which really kicks off the summer season in America. By Labor Day Weekend in early September, it’s time to put closer on the summer – and so there was another biker rally in Pawhuska. I ran into the mother at the Labor Day rally, and she told me she framed the photos for display in the family living room. 4 The stupid girl performing oral sex on a thick sausage for the crowd is being photographed by both Nelson Carter – and your humble narrator. Nelson was the local photographer for the Pawhuska newspaper – yet he and his wife were also the organizers of the annual biker rally. He was extremely gracious about giving me full access to the event. 5 Biker in the studio. I can’t recall the circumstances for this photo. I’m sure there was a reason – and perhaps it was nothing more than some mild shock value for my colleagues in the newsroom – especially my snobbish mother-in-law who always knew I was never good enough for her daughter. I’m sure it was my idea for him to strip off his shirt. This was also done with the Yashica camera. There was also something about the fellow that reminded me of American actor Danny Trejo: ConAir, Machete, Desperado.
6 The American neo-Nazi. This is from April, 1978 in what used to be a traditional German neighborhood in south St. Louis. The Italian families are still found on The Hill, near the Central West End of the city. You want good German food, hit it to the southside of the city. For the best Italian food, go to the family restaurants on The Hill. Same as it ever was. The German descendants on the southside did not want any damn neo-Nazis parading through the neighborhood. Yet the group had a parade permit. The group was duly escorted by the St. Louis police, who were primarily Black. Members of the Jewish Defense League were two deep on the sidewalks duly armed with glass Coke bottles. The neo-Nazis started the parade on foot – but the Black police did nothing to stop members of the Jewish Defense League from hurling the glass bottles at them. In no time at all, they jumped on the back of a large flat-bed truck and escaped. This was meant to be a dry-run for a parade in Skokie, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago. Check out The Blues Brothers (1980). Dan Ackroyd wrote the screenplay and was certainly aware of what happened in St. Louis, and later in Skokie.A week after I took this photograph, I drove off to eastern Montana for a newspaper gig in a cowboy town near the Badlands of North Dakota. I never looked back.
In that bygone era of grade school, when a collection of students was together in the same room with the same teacher for an academic year, my sixth-grade teacher bought us all a smart looking paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. If he had handed me a bag of gold, it would not have been as valuable as that 50-cent thesaurus. It changed my life.
For high school graduation, my mother presented me with a portable manual typewriter and a hardbound copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. I’ve had a half-century relationship with that edition – longer than my connection with any one person, and it has accompanied me from St. Louis-to-Seoul, and all points in between. That edition from 1970 remains an integral part of my book collection.
Allegedly, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), an immensely talented wit and writer, could imbibe liberal quantities of alcoholic refreshments throughout the day, hold forth with ease and intellectual dexterity on literary, political and religious issues at both formal lectures and lively parties - then sit before a keyboard at 1 a.m. and produce a stunning essay for Vanity Fair that marked him as the rightful heir to Gore Vidal in his prime.
I’m still waiting for lightning to strike, to know what I want to be when I grow up, to be enraptured by a muse who will inspire me as much as June Mansfield (1902-1979) shaped the life of Henry Miller (1891-1980), her husband, who went unaccompanied to Paris in 1930 and during this down-and-out period wrote countless letters to his wife and friends in New York City that became the material for the scandalous Tropic of Cancer – banned as obscene for 30-years, edited by his mistress and benefactor, Anais Nin (1903-1977). Perhaps the best we can do is to be an interesting collection of contradictions.
Call me Kennedy. Ahab had his whale. William Burroughs (1914-1997) had his heroin. Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) had his Patagonia. As for me, I have a camera and a passport.
The play’s the thing.
Michael Kennedy