My Liberal Diary

Day 76, My Liberal Diary

I am facing an emotionally trying time in the near future, my golden retriever, George (Sweet Georgia Peaches) is having problems getting up. She is over-weight and sixteen years old. George has been my companion for all of her life. She has travelled aboard ships with me into foreign lands and has greeted me at the door and seen me off every time I have walked through our doorway for the past sixteen years. George is very protective of me, as I am of her. I am investigating a crematoriums for large dogs, she weighs about 110. I am dreading the moment that I have to put her down. I cannot morally justify having a vet put her down, she is my dog and I will end her life, when the time comes. I have had to do this before with other dogs that shared my life. It is a heart-breaking thing to have to do. I suppose I could dig a grave for her in our back yard, yet the thought of starring at an open hole awaiting an old friend, is as disturbing as waiting to find her dead in the floor, and having to deal with a large dead animal as well as the shared grief of my wife, the other dogs, and I suppose, my own. I realize that doing something yourself, rather than relying on someone else, is not a very liberal practice, yet I cannot shirk this responsibility, nor can I entrust it to a stranger. She will tell me when the time has come: dogs know these things. I just wish there were a way to keep that loving animal for more years, she has shared so much with me. She has been a guardian and play-station of our grand child, she has protected us from countless stray dogs and cats, postal employees, UPS drivers, and squirrels. Life without her happy silly grin will have a big empty space.

 

Sorry to hear about the pup!

 

Day 77, My Liberal Diary
If I understand this, the government might shut down if they don't pass their budget? Why can't I do that? I never seem to pass my budget, if I don't make a little extra playing music or building a gun, I can't pay my bills on time and when the creditors start their nasty calls, I could just tell them "Sorry, I'm closed due to budget restraints". FYI, nobody has sent me the $100,000.00 I requested to get me back to a starting point where I can practice my new Liberal agenda. I have to admit that this disappoints me, but I am equally sure that this is one of those over-sights that I keep reading about, apparently they have spread from Congress to the general population. I don't know how this could have happened, since our elected representatives are so separate from the working class, it must have been air-borne, spreading from plane jet contrails while they fly over us on their way to important governmental golfing events.
I do have approximately 1100 bricks that I had planned to use around the house, not enough for the Great Wall of Theodore, Alabama, but certainly enough to help with Mr. Trump's wall and I am willing to donate them all except for a few that I need to hold my crab traps in place, if they'll let me slide on the tax thing for a while. I can even assist in loading them onto Air Force One, if they'll land at the Theodore airport and send a few of those black SUVs to carry them. These are premium bricks, although moving them will displace numerous black widow spiders, a few snakes, lizards, and possibly a family of armadillos, but they sneaked up here from Mexico anyway so I really don't care if they are deported, it might stop them from digging holes all over my lawn.

 

Day 78, My Liberal Diary
In New Orleans, the city is sending in masked crews with armed swat teams to protect them as they sneakily remove and destroy statues commemorating the Confederacy. Their vehicles have the signs and advertisements of the businesses covered as well as the license plates. The city is spouting platitudes like "Racist", "White-Supremacist", "Shameful chapter in the history of our great city"...do I need to remind you that the South was all Democrats? Lincoln was a Republican! You'd think that Liberals would be a little more, well, Liberal? We liberals founded the Ku Klux Klan and one of our members, George Wallace, stood in the doorway of a public school to block negro students from entering until someone shot him. It shames me that we would rather pretend that our history never existed, re-write the history of our country to suit the politically correct. We were wrong about how we treated some people, why can't we just admit it and go on, why do we have to pretend that it never happened?
I was talking with some right-wing associates of mine that manufacture firearms and listened as they talked about how slow their business is, now that we have a President that doesn't want to destroy the second amendment. They were saying that we need to re-elect Obama! Obama did more for the firearms industry than anyone in the history of America. More guns were manufactured and sold during his eight years in office than the sum total of market years since 1776, making Barrack Obama the single greatest gun salesman of the past two centuries! Now that's something for the history books!

 

Just say N.O.

 

If I wanted to raise 100,000.00 I would start a Go Fund Me site dedicated to converting conservatives to Liberals!

 

Day 79, My Liberal Diary
"May you live in interesting times". Often quoted as an ancient Chinese curse, has actually no provenience in China, it was apparently manufactured here in the good ole USA and marketed in China. Apparently, we Americans have gotten so damned politically correct that we can't even admit to a creative expression of our cynicism. I now know people that will lie to you when the truth would have worked much better, it has just become ingrained in them to live in a world of platitudes and fantasy. They live in a world where, if you say it enough, it must be true and I do not believe they even realize that the lights are on but nobody's home. My favorite motorcycle jacket is black leather with a large Confederate Battle flag on the back. I do not wear it because I believe the Confederacy is going to rise again, nor do I wear it to celebrate my racist paranoid delusions. I wear it because I bought it for $20.00 at a yard sale and it is really a great jacket, the flag represents absolutely nothing to me except it looks cool and the Confederate flag has always been a part of my history as a Southerner. I will not pretend that I am not a Southerner, the South directs my dialect and accent/ My dietary preferences are Southern; I don't think they even eat crawfish North of the Mason/Dixon Line, have no idea what the hell boudin is, and try getting biscuits with sawmill gravy, some grits, and a slab of country ham with the fat fried crispy in Chicago sometime, just for shits and giggles. I prefer Southern women, not girls, but real, gentile Southern women, ones that have the basic philosophy that if I can catch it or kill it, they'll cook it for supper. I like saying hi to people that I meet and take a second to enquire about their health, kids, general state of being. My motive for this is not so much a desire to know this information as it is an exchange of social amenities people are supposed to be friendly with one another. I like friendly, it beats the hell out of being angry afraid, or indifferent. The Confederate flag and the history of my people here in the South, including being conquered by an invading army of folks that have never eaten gumbo for breakfast, has nothing to do with racism and should not be nearly as offensive as trying to erase a heritage and culture with your silly urbanomics. I am sure that some of my liberal amigo are offended by my heritage and the display of my Confederate battle flag, but bless your heart, I really don't give a damn.

 

Day 80, My Liberal Diary
Today, I found two dead birds on the deck of a ship I was unloading. The ship was returning from the oil patch in the Gulf of Mexico with a load of drill pipe and tooling to P&A (plug and abandon) a well. The birds were in the finch family, one being a bluebird. You see them frequently on oil rigs, having gotten blown to sea by a storm or strong wind and platform being their only place to rest. You know they don't belong there, an oil rig is just not a good habitat for birds, there are too many ways of getting themselves hurt or killed, but their alternative is to fall into the ocean and be eaten by a fish. Since land is generally a bit out of their normal flight range, the rough-necks start feeding them and soon, they are getting themselves into places where they will be injured because they think they have found a strange new land with free food and plenty of shelter. They'll live out their lives there until something kills them. If the roughnecks didn't feed them, they would probably skip from one platform to another until "Land Ho!" and have the chance to make lots of new little baby birds, fending for themselves, but a free meal is a powerful incentive to just stay there where you don't belong, until you die. I think a lot of our major urban areas are like that. People will spend their entire lives in an area because they really don't have to do much to take care of themselves, become a baby daddy, sell a little crack, do anything except to get a job and improve your station in life. And if you get killed, there are plenty of us Liberals to blame guns and policemen because whoever shot you, is pretty much generally in the same trap so we can't blame them. It is not your fault that the person you decided to rob had a gun.
I saw a company is selling blue jeans with fake mud on them for $465.00....I am pretty sure that if anyone is actually buying them, it is the tattooed Lumberjacks in Flannel shirts and logging boots with the seat of their jeans much more worn than the knees. Fake mud? OK, I realize this is a Liberal fad, trying to look like you actually work for a living, but fake mud? I have several thousand dollars worth of real jeans with real welding holes, mud stains, grease, epoxy, paint. I could retire on this! I will sell anyone out there, a pair of real honest to god, worn-out by actual labor, muddy, greasy stained jeans, ones that even smell bad, for a fraction of $465.00 a pair. Hell, I'll send you five pairs a week for $465.00, now beat that. You'll not only look like you work for a living, you'll smell like it too! The knees and pockets will be suitably worn and I can promise you that there is not a single pair with a shiny ass from sitting around pretending to be a lumberjack. I even have some blood-stained ones because one of the hazards of working for a living is that occasionally. you might get injured. It is not a manly beard and a flannel shirt that makes you a lumberjack, it is actually leaving the city and going out to where they cut down trees with saws and axes, with real dirt, mud, sweat, grease...buy my jeans and everyone will think you are a real man until they see the Hillary for President sticker on your Prius!

 

Day 81, My Liberal Diary
I do not mind being called a racist. This word has lost it's meaning, to the point of ridiculous. It has become a single-word oxymoron, if it were possible.

I am quite content with being a "Racist" if that means that I have an aversion to gangsta, droopy-panted, ghetto homeboys, et al. I base my judgment of people on a personal qualification and merit system that most, if not all, of that genre of folks fail to meet. It is actually more of a cultural thing rather than race but I don't have the time or desire to argue semantics with those that decided I was a racist so I'll just accept the title and go on. I listened to folks making dire predictions about what would come to pass if we allowed this system of entitlement to progress and heard them all labeled as paranoid racist southern white trash and, low and behold, if you took the word nigger out of the conversation, pretty much everything they predicted is here today and you read about it in the news.

 

Day 82, My Liberal Diary
I am sixty-one years old. Some days, I feel much older but most days, I still think that I am 17, and when I look into a mirror, I do not recognize the face that stares back at me. I still have the muscle memory of slam-dunking a basket ball, something that the ever increasing gravitational forces have prevented me from doing for several years now. Arthritis often makes it difficult to trim my toe-nails or don a pair of socks but I still do not hesitate to put on a diving helmet and jump over the side of a boat and traverse to the bottom of the sea, where I earn my living.

I am married to a darling woman of Southern heritage. She has some serious health issues and likes to drink a little too much wine most evenings, but I do not mind, as long as she confines her drinking to a snoot full of wine in the evenings when I am home to look after her. Sometimes, I think the world is too big a place for her.

We live in Theodore, Alabama, just outside of Mobile. I bought a house here right after Katrina. We have three dogs, a koi pond filled with fish, and a bunch of fruit trees. We have a garden that is as much of a learning curve as it is enjoyment. I did not realize that certain favorite vegetables need to be planted during the winter. I have a recording studio in my house and love to write songs and record them.

Maggie is my favorite dog. She is a Doberman that is smarter than dogs should be but still hasn’t outgrown her puppy propensity to get into mischief. I think that is why she is my favorite. George (my fat golden retriever bitch) is very well trained and equally as head-strong. The wiener-dog, Garfield, is a killer by choice. He insists on killing mostly tree frogs that abound near the koi pond and those little chameleon lizards that hang out on the gazebo behind the house. Each of my puppies love me with unbridled devotion and they provide me with a degree of comfort and companionship beyond the scope of most humans.

I do not recall a time where I believed that the world around me was a safe haven. My childhood was a university of distrust and fears that had to be either confronted head-on or avoided until trapped by their tentacles. I did not become a gregarious person and often dwell on the lyics of an Emmy Lou Harris song; “You waste no time on vengeance, you’ve no wish to fight again, You put your faith in ‘God, we Trust’ but little faith in man”. I am not a Christian but I am a devout believer in God, it is just that I choose not to worship without a complete understanding and the Emperor Constantine left too much out of the bible to simply choose to believe what he left for us mere mortals. I ask for this understanding each day and the Lord answers my prayers; I give thanks each day for the many blessings that I have been given. If the day arrives that Jesus returns, he will find a brother ready to stand beside him until the end, for I truly believe that we are all sons of the one true God. I do not need the solace of the religion reward system and therefore, do not believe in any form of after-life, but should I prove to be incorrect in this assumption, most of my trespasses will be forgiven and those that cannot be reconciled, will have already been paid for in this life. I believe in the sanctity of life and the necessity of death and will kill without hesitation, if needed to provide food or protection but would much prefer to co-exist with most of my fellow creatures except for Republicans and those that feel “entitled” to the product of other’s efforts.

There are visible lines that exist between all cause and effect and I have been blessed with a clarity of vision that allows me to instinctively recognize this. I do not have an agenda other than taking care of my family and friends and sharing what I have learned through mistakes so that others may begin where I finished and hopefully, they will surpass. It is with that single-minded purpose, that I devote most of my limited resources towards preparing for times much more dire than those presently experience by my neighbors, for I believe the end is coming to the world that we grew up in.

 

Day 83, My Liberal Diary
I had a dream! We had finally realized our liberal utopia and the results had unintended consequences. Unemployment and inflation made us more dependent on .gov and redistribution of wealth. More terrorist acts, real or false flag, further tightened restrictions on travel, dissemination of news, and free speech. More were forced by necessity to move into tightly controlled urban areas or refugee camps. Jobs were offered to feed the children of those that help enforce the new social mandates. Rewards were paid for ratting out non-compliant persons, much like the already tried and true D.A.R.E. Program on steroids. Riots mandated marshal law and most of us supported it as American, since the rioters were minorities that are more highly dependent on the social tit. The two party system continued to swap licks to divert our attention from the real problems. Jesus returned during all this, shook his head in disbelief and muttered "WTF?" and went back home.

 

Day 84, My Liberal Diary
Memory is such a cherished thing. I have so many great memories that I almost never dwell on the contrast. I remember a simpler America, where people smiled in greeting one another and didn't bother to lock their doors.
A dumb toy pink elephant once made me cry; actually, it made me cry twice. It began with a shooting star.
There was a meteor shower in November of 2000. The papers said it would peak around 05:00 with as many as 13 shooting stars visible per minute. Just ten minutes of watching would make open the door for 130 wishes that might come true and try as I might, I could not come up with even one minutes worth of wants, unless I decided to waste something as powerful as a wish on specific guitars for my collection. I guess that made me realize that I was pretty much a happy man. Life now has a quality that no amount of money can buy or no amount of envy could steal. So I sat out to make at least a ten minute wish list and soon discovered that I had to get into things for people that I didn't even especially like and still hadn't quite made five minutes worth. I figured at the peak of the meteor shower, I would call out numbers from the wish list "9, 36, 71..."etc. Shooting stars can be very fast and tricky.

04:00 was cold and clear. Jimi and I were in our night clothes. We lay out on the deck of our shanty-boat and watched the skies until daylight hid the stars behind the grey of morning.We lay side by side, her head on my shoulder, holding hands and counting pieces of the sky as they burned and fell towards earth. One final star split into two separate firey streamers, something that I had never before seen.

Back inside our warm boat, lying in bed trying to warm our cold feet on each other's back-side, we laughed like children.
"Did you get all you wishes made?" she asked me?
"Only made one".
"Just one? That whole list you been writing all day...just one?"
"Yep. Just one. Good night, Angel."
She poked me in the ribs sharply, "Hey!"
"What"?
"The one...your wish?"
"It's kind of silly. Wasn't even on my list, in fact. Not important. Good night".
"Nope!" She grabbed a particularly sensitive part of me. "Won't work; give it up Mister!"
"I just wished I could keep the feeling that if I made a wish on a shooting star, it would come true, just a little bit longer."
"Good Night." She smiles when she sleeps.
I went to sleep thinking about that stupid pink elephant. His name was Toppy. My Father showed me my first shooting star when I was three.

"Make a wish and it might come true," he explained. All I could think of that I wanted at that moment was a pink elephant, having just gone to the movies to see Fantasia.
"I wish I had a pink elephant," I said , most solemnly. I don't remember if my Father laughed or not.
The Christmas when I was about to turn 10, there was a package under the tree with my name on it. I didn't really expect much of a Christmas that year. My parent were about to be separated and fighting a lot. I was the oldest child and had to be a buffer between them and my younger brothers and sister, as much as a 10 year old can be. I had to grow up fast and there wasn't time to be ten and wishes on stars wouldn't keep my parents together and neither would presents and I didn't give a rat's ass if Christmas came or not. But Christmas eve night, I opened my box and there was a stuffed pink elephant. "Toppy" was printed on a circus blanket covering it's back. I stared at it in disbelief," a stupid fucking toy.."
I carried it to bed with me that night, seven years after I had wished for it, and I held it to me as I listened for the dreaded arguments to begin but my parents didn't fight that night and I cried myself to sleep holding that toy.
Years later, while packing to move, I last saw "Toppy" in the bed of a pickup going to the city dump. Faded, more white than pink, one ear missing, batting leaking from split seam, I picked it up and held it for a minute before tossing it back into the rest of trash going to the dump, with a mild flush of embarrassment. I was getting married tomorrow and nothing would ever happen to my family. We would never fight and would be together for ever and our children would never be afraid and I would take them to see Fantasia and buy them stupid toys to play with and I found myself thinking about pink elephants with tears in my eyes for the second time.

 

Write a song about some of that.
My Toppy must be a Liberal Democrat...Its the in thing now, Hope you sell a million!

 

Day 85, My Liberal Diary
I am still waiting patiently to receive my entitlements but haven't even received a single cent of the $100,000.00 I requested nearly a month ago. Hell, I haven't even gotten the pink Australian pussy hat I was promised. I am starting to suspect this liberal thing about entitlements is as much a fairy-tale as electing Hillary Clinton president was. And where is my free health care that Obama promised? I am paying so much more for health insurance now that I am starting to think that he might have lied to us. I know Obama was only trying to do what he thought was good for our country but someone sold him some bad information just like they convinced me I could get all these entitlements. I would have probably liked the man, if he'd only left guns alone and blamed the idiot miscreants that were shooting folks with them rather than the ones that just owned them for protection, hunting and shooting sports. I realize that a vast majority of the random shootings taking place were "black on black" according to the FBI Crime statistics, so maybe being black was a handy-cap that he couldn't get around because if he called a spade a spade, some white liberal would label him a racist.
Random selection could have made my grand-father the inventor of the jet engine and I could be living on his earned assets in complete luxury. Life would be a series of happy debauchery with little crisis to develop me into the misanthropic hard-ass that I have morphed into. I would have gone to some Ivy-league school and had girl-friends with names like “Buffy” or “Katherine” and my friends would be bankers and stock analysts. We would have live pigeon shooting with Purdie side-by-sides at the Island range on long week ends with polite servants providing snacks of cucumber sandwiches with fish eggs and the crusts removed from the fresh-baked bread. My walls would be adorned with trophies of my first African safari, when I was twelve.
The worst hardships of adolescence would be caps and braces and maybe that one broken arm from my motor-cycle accident. We might tour the ranch in the Beech-craft but the Gulfstream would take us to the villa near El Chorro. I would have little worth as a man but that could be forgiven that when the Allman Brothers played at my birthday party. I might father the fourth generation of useless children to follow in my silk-slippered foot-steps. One of my fraternity brothers would get elected president and I might get a cabinet appointment; what better qualifications can you have than immense wealth and breeding? The Bilderburgs would offer me a seat in planning the NWO. My wife would not understand me but actresses and models would fight for the chance.
Costs would never be an issue, in fact, I would never even consider asking the price and just assume the accountants would take care of it in due time. Wars would be something that I start to manipulate events rather than something that I might get drafted to die in. And I would never know the frustrations of having someone else control the events that shape or change my life. All of the rest would just circle outside my ring of wagons and be given the attention that a cook might give to a fly on a turd in the neighbor’s backyard. This represents the Liberal that I wish that I were rather than having to work for a living producing hydrocarbons that contribute to global warming, subsidizing the firearms industry because I figured out that I run a high risk of getting shot by many of my fellow liberals (statistically speaking), and having serious doubts about this Liberal thing being as grand an idea as I have been led to believe.

 

Day 86, My Liberal Diary
MUSIC FOR THE SAVAGED BREAST
When I was a child, my mother would sing. She had a voice like an angel and was quite popular in the local musician circles. Each Friday night, there would be a jam session, called a hoot-nannie, at either our house or someone else’s. I would spread a quilt behind the couch and listen to the grown-ups sing and play music until we would fall asleep and have to be carried to my bed. I wanted to sing and play the guitar or piano so my grandmother bought me a guitar when I was five. The price I had to pay was to sit on the stage at the holy-roller church she belonged too each Sunday and several nights a week with my guitar and try to play along with the sons of the Reverend Powers. Larry Powers was left handed and could play anything he could hear on his Fender Telecaster. He was an idiot savant and could barely spell his name. His head was extremely large and deformed and his hands almost tiny, but God had given him the gift of music and that alone elevated Larry Powers equal to anyone. Larry died at the age of 25 from an enlarged heart; nothing else could have taken him but having too much heart.
The music left my mother one day and she became a stranger. I did not know her or see her again until I was a grown man with a broken family of my own and the music had abandoned me as well and I was dying of an angry heart and heavily medicated with coke-whores and leaches. My blood was being sucked away with all my possessions and I only awaited the end to come with a bullet and no tears. I wrote my goodbyes and it took on the quality a lyric; it’s funny how the mind will bend in those last desperate moments. A melody came to me; a soft haunting melody:
Out of the thawing winter earth, the muddy melting snow all but gone
Uncurls the first green sprouts that soon will cover the ground.
Bugs will crawl in the new grass and birds will feed on the bugs,
A cat might wait for their young to fall from the nest on a limb up above.
And I would pet the cat; the cat would purr…
A little love and tenderness would distract it from the birds.
I would sit in my rocking chair and watch the flowers grow
From weeds that came up with the grass that I would never mow.


I am sorry if I got distracted by something that I thought I would need;
Maybe I was just passing time, waiting for the changing seasons.
Now Summer has gone, the grass turned brown, the birds have all gone south.
The cat and I watch and wait , we know what it is all about.
And now I’ll sit in my rocking chair, waiting for the snow
That soon will cover the parched brown earth where flowers used to grow.

Always before, music was happiness and joy but I discovered it could also take the pain from tears of frustration and the bitterness from anger. Music is oil on troubled waters and salve for the soul. I wish more folks knew this.

 

Day 87, My Liberal Diary
Ever increasing medical costs and the IRS have drained my assets, wiped out my savings and retirement account and left me barely able to afford subsistence on the salary that I earn working for a marine contractor supporting the oil industry.If it were not for the small additional earnings I make from my music, I would no longer be able to afford to maintain my household.My ability to work over-seas has been cancelled by the failing health of my darling wife, the Republican, and although my office is only a mile from my home, my earnings are substantially less than what they have been throughout most of my life. This creates a paradox, in that I earn too much money for government assistance, in spite of my declaring myself as a Liberal! My bank, the Bank of Nelly, is a ceramic yellow elephant that holds around $200.00 in change if I don't feed her the copper-coated zinc coins that seem so much more common. This is the second generation of the Nelly bank, the first one, bought at the Mobile Flea Market for $0.50, was given to the children of a friend that couldn't afford Christmas last year. My wife and daughter were so touched by my Nelly sacrifice, that they mounted a quest and somehow, was able to locate a replacement Nelly for me. I never envisioned that by this time in my life, my sole savings would be contained in a child's piggy bank and a basket of pennies, but it is what it is. I do not live on credit, and I do not live in a deficit. If I can't find the money, I do without and I don't blame anyone else or demand they share their earnings. I just keep stuffing dimes and quarters into Nelly and when she gets full, roll the coins up and put them in a drawer until needed. When emergencies has arisen, I have sold guitars or guns that I bought when I earned enough to have disposable income but this practice has a short half-life. I often wonder what ever happened to my country and the American dream?
The Bahamas are about 60 or so nautical miles from the US and people in the Bahamas drive on the left side of the road. This was a British tradition made a law in 1620 because wearing a sword made it hard to get on a horse except on the left side and slicing and dicing the object of your road-rage was difficult if both met right to right side. Bahamians don’t have many swords; don’t think there has even been a stone one found in the ruins of their ancient temples. It’s hard to buy a pocket knife over here.
It always amazes me that the people over there are mostly negroes. They don’t talk, dress, or act like the negroes in the States. The children are all neatly dressed alike at the schools and I have yet to hear of one of them cutting down their classmates with an uzi. Most of the people there have jobs. They live in neat houses and drive nice cars and there isn’t a Walmart on the island anywhere. Gas stations still have attendants and you tip them for filling your tank and they appreciate it.
These people are not descendants of indigenous people; they are people that were destined for the slave markets in America and for what-ever reason, the slavers decided that they were not very marketable so they just dropped them off here rather than throwing them over-board. Nothing grows there but they managed to survive on what the sea could provide them. They kept one of their African ceremonial traditions, the Junkanoo. They dress up like chickens and dance to a drum beat; tourists seem to enjoy it. This is a Black country, owned and operated by black people and only sixty miles from the U.S. and they are a world apart from the blacks that I grew up with at home. There is not much crime here. There is very little poverty. Race issues are virtually non-existent. You can smell cracked conch cooking everywhere. I do not believe that 70% of the young men here ever go to jail, like in the United States. There has never been a civil rights movement here; no need for it. There is no marching or rioting and most of the folks would wonder what Rodney King did to deserve getting his ass kicked by those policemen. The police here do not even carry guns most of the time. They wear uniforms proudly and smartly and look like police officers, not soldiers and people still respect them and ask them for help. It is not unusual to buy one of them lunch and talk about where to get the best crawfish. They are proud of their country and they damned well should be.
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I'm sort of a conservative liberal, Ghrit.