Here I am at the University of Oklahoma Annual Class Reunion on the Homecoming Game Weekend. It was great fun. I got to pal a little bit with a football player from Bud Wilkinson’s last team and an accountant from the class of 1954.

That name tag I am wearing takes me back to the time when the USA had a chance of becoming civilized. (Click on the photo to read it.) I am afraid that is no longer possible now even after we elect the most civilized leader we have ever elected. He will become like the General in Salman Rushdie’s novel “Shalimar the Clown”. The General I am sure I met when I was in Kashmir, India back in August of 1979. He was a Colonel then; Kashmir was just beginning to heat up. He was a civilized urbane man right out of a John Kenneth Galbraith mold. Events took over. He became the most murdering man you can imagine.

That is what is about to happen to Obama and us. Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a failed state. We will be obliged to level it as we did Berlin, as the General did in Kashmir. I would suggest a good reading of “Shalimar the Clown”.

The General was a friend of the old man who put together my trek in the Himalayas. The old man had been a Secretary for the last Maharaja of Kashmir. He was getting intelligence for the General. He knew his way around the villages the General later took back to before the stone ages. Read the book. Rushdie knows that area of the world, where we will finish our trek into “The Horror”. The General would come for Afternoon Tea in the old man’s bungalow where I had been made welcome while recovering from an infection I had picked up in my lungs from a cabin boy: Dal Lake Houseboat.

Will

This is the picture of Ralph Chubb who talks in his writing about an earlier time or maybe a future time where we learn not to be taken in by materialism commercialism. On my BlogSpot page http://willdecker.blogspot.com you will find a page I captured from a website called Bleeding Queers by a great old queer in NYC. If you copy it to your photo viewer you can read it in its entirety and see some of what Chubb wrote. This is the direct link to the article: http://bleedingqueers995.blogspot.com/2008/10/few-more-surviving-images-from-ralph.html Here is another article on Chubb you might find as interesting as I did: http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ralph_Nicholas_Chubb:_Poet%2C_Printer%2C_Pacifist%2C_Prophet

I am thinking my W. Edwards Deming and his System of Profound Knowledge is the way to this time. I am thinking if we don’t figure him out and use him we will never remove ourselves from materialism commercialism and the disasters they bring us.

Do we love our children?

In the 1970’s I surrounded myself with technology with the third rebuilding of Decker Foundry, my airplane not to count the nurturing of my young family and two boys. Almost all but not all failed. Sort of like my friend when talking about the cats who stalk the birds in my back yard. They leap at them; they miss most times but not every time.

The picture of me is one taken at the Norman Westheimer Field Air Festival on September 20, 08 in front of a Beech Baron.

Last night, August 28, 2008 I was showing my friend Jeremy these videos on my laptop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb84xVMbfqA&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoAVce-Rc2c&feature=rec-fresh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=govYC3eEbvA&feature=related while the Democratic Party Convention was on my television. Wow what a contrast. Does it remind you of those scenes we were getting last week from the Olympics in Beijing?

The videos show the Denver Police trapping the demonstrators. When we in the Army Reserves back in the 1960’s and 1970’s were taught Riot Control we were told to always provide a way of escape for those we were seeking to control. When I was sharing this with a friend last night he said, “Police these days are taught to look at civilians as threats, not fellow citizens.”

That reminded me of what my court appointed psychologist said to me one time during a Committee Meeting in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, “Will, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and Oklahoma Law Enforcement consider it success when they can get you in prison.”

The contrast in the two scenes show to me what life is like when you are inside the Democratic Party and what life is like when you are outside the Democratic Party. No difference with the Republicans except the Democrats promise health care, mortgage protection, better wages. Didn’t Hitler promise the people of Germany similar things?

Will