Family History

My family has been pushing me to write a post about a certain member of the family, which is great.  It's one of those non-paying commissions that it doesn't matter what I write about him, no one but my brother-in-law is going to actually be supportive enough to read it.  If they did dad would clearly be mad about the post I wrote about having to use the bathroom after him, mom would be pissed about the duck-walker post & my sister would be enraged about the post describing how she snorts when she laughs.

Makes her sound kinda sorta like a donkey.

What I'm trying to say is that I have never been a fan of Country music...well, most Country music.  Some of it is okay in my book & the stuff that is usually comes with the label "Americana" not "Country."

Which means that it is really a closely kept secret that my family is at least partially responsible for the popularization of Country music as we know it today.  Both the good shit like Tod Snider & the shit that is really, well, just pure shit.

You know, shit.  Like Billy & Garth & who knows who the fuck else,  You know, shit country:

Because most of that shit is flag waving pro-war neo-conservative rah-rah bull shit that is really just horribly bad rock & roll & nothing like Johnny Cash, who was really very liberal & the Americana country that comes with people like Woody Guthrie that is really very extremely socialist.

But then, to be fair, the family member that helped popularize it was, well, really pretty far from the whole pro-War Americana bull shit, even though he was also kinda sorta famous for fighting in a war among other things.  But then he saw what happened after said war & listed it in his book as one of his deepest regrets.

But the family is still really proud of that whole San Juan thing & that's mainly because, like my blog, I am really the only one that has read his journal.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that my mother wants me to write a post about her great grandfather & that's all well & good because no one in my family, aside from my brother-in-law actually bothers to read anything that I write.

Thank you Jeff.

So his name is Billy McGinty & he is a famous Scottish Rugby player.

I'm just joking.

His name is Billy McGinty & he's actually very Catholic Irish & has roots in Derry from the Provence of Ulster & came from a clan that was famous as being the brutish thugs of Ulster, until they allied themselves with the O'Neil's & became the brutish thugs that was really the military branch of the king of Ireland...for the brief time that Ireland was actually unified.

You know, those whole 3 seconds in Irish history.

Originally they were the O'Fionnachta Clan until they started killing exclusively for the king & became gentlemen & the clan changed it's name to McGinty to reflect this new found, & short lived status.

They even adopted a coat of arms with the motto Felis demulcata mitis, a "stroked cat is gentle."

And they were living the high life until Ireland became a colony of England & things sort of went south, they stayed Catholic which didn't win them any favors & for centuries they took their oath to the O'Neil's so seriously that Oliver Cromwell targeted the entire clan for extinction...warts & all.

Which brings us to the 1750s when a couple of McGinty's were arrested for instigating a revolution & as punishment they were sent to Boston to work as slave labor only to, well, to do the exact same thing the British kicked them out of Ulster for doing, only this time, you know, successfully.

Fast-forward about a century, they seemed to take Horace Greeley seriously, & Billy McGinty was born in St. Louis in 1871 & he's the person that my mommy wants me to write about because she doesn't really get that we make fun of the history in the blog & don't really celebrate it.

That's Billy & his wife & the picture doesn't do justice to how short he was.

They call him an Oklahoma cowboy because that's where he was from & sort of what made him famous.

He did have a couple of run-ins, both friendly & not so friendly, with the Dalton gang.

And if it seems like everyone out west knew everyone else out west...that's because they did.  They seriously did, there were that few people out there & that's sorta kinda the exact reason why you have to roll your eyes when the pro-gun crowd compares the violence of the Wild West with the violence of today as a reason to roll back the open carry laws that were put into place to stop the violence back then.

Those four dead Dalton gang-bangers were like a third of the population.

And that actually works out great for Billy McGinty, because he kept a journal of his exploits, especially with Teddy Roosevelt which you can actually buy on Amazon & like me, he really thought that the most embarrassing facts were really the best ones to tell.

And don't worry the royalties go to someone that is not at all related to the family.

But in either case, it turns out that I am really the only person in the family that has actually bothered to read the book that Billy McGinty wrote & since he has my sense of humor, we're going to focus on the really embarrassing parts of his adventures with Teddy.

And Billy is really easy to find in the picture, because he's the one that is wearing the yellow hat.

His story starts when he was training with Seth Bullock & preparing to get shipped out to Cuba during the Spanish-American War, which took place neither in Spain nor America as we have pointed out in a previous post.

For those of you that don't know, Seth Bullock is better known as Raylan Givens on the FX show Justified.

He went into a little detail about the training, about befriending Teddy Roosevelt & breaking in what would later become Teddy's favorite horse & yadda, yadda, yadda.

But he went into astounding detail about the episode regarding his pants.

That's right, his pants.  Like I said, he spends more time with the embarrassing parts of his story than he does the parts he should be egotistical about.  This might be a product of his humility, or it could just be that he figured you'd rather hear about the funny shit than the daring-do, so out of respect for his journal, mom, we're going to focus on what were clearly his favorite stories.

 The thing about the pants is that they only gave him a single pair.

And he was a poor Irish cowboy & he was really proud of his uniform & really proud of his relationship with Teddy & they made him wear the same pants all through his training in Louisiana with Seth Bullock & the other Rough Riders, up until he got transferred to Teddy's unit after the thing with the horse.

And those pants they gave him were filthy by the time he boarded the Seneca on his way to Cuba.

So to clean them, he tied them to a rope & threw them over the front of the ship with the belief that the salt-water would clean them.

So, he sorta kinda keel-hauled his pants.

And yeah, they got ripped to shit.

To be fair, he was a cowboy from Oklahoma that was used to riding the Great Planes between the Mississippi & the Rocky Mountains so what the fuck did he know about keel-hauling?

So he sorta kinda went from dirty pants to no pants.

Now if you've seen the relatives on mom's side of the family, you would understand that at just 6 feet I am freakishly tall.  Six feet kinda sorta makes you a giant among them.

So when he did get a new pair of pants, he got them from a man about my size & that sorta kinda became a running gag for the entirety of his stay in Cuba.

He got off the boat in pants that were a few sizes too big & held on by a rope that he constantly had to tie & retie.

He was pinned down by machine gun fire in pants that were a few sizes too big.

He made friends with his first Black man in pants that were three-sizes to big.

And he captured a machine gun & charged up San Juan Hill in pants that were several sizes too big & held to his waist by a rope that didn't do too good of a job of actually keeping them around his waist.

So you know, he sorta kinda fought a war like this:

Because he keel-hauled his pants.

And that sort of self-made problem should be evidence enough that I am related to him.

And then the war was over & he stuck around for some of the occupation & yes, he got a new pair of pants that actually fit.

And the town he was stationed outside of was strictly off limits.

Mind you this is seemed to be his absolute favorite story about his time in Cuba.

Everyone else was allowed to go into their towns, but the town that he was told to secure after the war was off limits to all American soldiers.

So he sort of took it upon himself to plot with a couple of his buddies to preform a clandestine mission to sneak into town, find the first bar & brothel they could, drink & gamble away what little money they had with them & make it back to camp without being caught.

So a lot of this happened:

And a lot of this happened:

And according to my great-great-grandfather, when you have as much to drink as he did, you forget that you are supposed to sneak back into camp.

Everything else worked out fine & they would have gotten away with it had they not stumbled drunkenly back to camp being as loud as humanly possibly.

At what point they were promptly put into quarantine. 

Because the town they sneaked into & were forbidden to enter was suffering an epidemic of smallpox.

And his good friend Teddy came to personally bitch him out from a very safe distance.  According to Billy, he had never seen Teddy that mad in his entire life & it didn't help that they were still drunk enough to laugh.

And by the time they all sobered up it turned out that they were all smallpox free & about ready to return to the United States & get mustered out.

And that is where his journal ends.

It was just a war journal.

If you read the book, the part about working for Buffalo Bill in his Wild West Show.

And the part about Annie Oakley

And his performance at the Chicago World's Fair

His deathbed visit to Teddy

And his later efforts to popularize early Country music were all recorded by historians & not by Billy himself, meaning that all the embarrassing moments were completely ignored, meaning I'm not going to cover them here, I'll leave that for mom to read on her own.

But Billy did say that he went to Cuba under the impression that he was going to liberate the Cubans from the oppressing rule of Spain.

He was, in the end, extremely vocally upset about the fact that Cuba went from a Spanish colony to an American Colony & not a free country.  Despite the keel-hauled pants & the drunken smallpox, the colonization of Cuba became the real point of his journal.

I'll leave you with this:

Halloween...Because the Devil Is In the Pasties

If you are like me, you love Halloween. If you are like me you love Halloween because, well, because you are a pervert & proud of it.  You are a dirty man today, you were a dirty young man in the past, & if you decide to live long enough, you fully intend to be a dirty old man.

There is one reason we all love Halloween...sluts.  The world should have more of them & Halloween opens that door & allows everyone to fall in that category.

Just please understand that I am not using the word "Slut" as an insult.  There is nothing derogatory about it.  It is not Machismo.  It is totally not misogynistic.  

What it is, is a support of Women's Liberation & gender equality.  I am progressive enough to understand that ALL women, if they are to be free & equal should be EXTREMELY sexually liberated so much so that they act & dress like it is Halloween year round.

Because we all know that gender equality goes hand-in-hand with pasties & thongs & as much skin as humanly possible & women will not be free until "slut" becomes something to strive for & not an insult.

What I am saying is that I support Women's Liberation!  What I am saying is that I am with you Jo Freeman! Let's take a stand for gender equality &, more importantly, female sexuality!  Let's not stop fighting until women can treat every day like it is Halloween!

That will be one step closer to the perfect world.

Now let's get all academic on this shit!

But first, bite me Rod Zombie, Marylin Manson wrote my Halloween soundtrack.

As we all know, Halloween was first discovered in 1978 by a great explorer named John Carpenter.

But then it was lost & rediscovered in 2007 by a great musician & a horrible director named Rob Zombie.

But before all of that, thousands of years before all of that, it was a Celtic Holiday called Samhain.

No, I said "Sam Hain" not "Corey Haim."

Sam Hain, if you are a Supernatural fan is two different words & looks something like this:

Samhain, if you are Wicca, is one word & looks something like this:

Now to be honest, Samhain is about as accurate in Supernatural as it is if you are a Wicca, only maybe a little more accurate if you are Wicca because at least there it is an official holiday but one that a lot of them associate with the Green Man.

The Green Man looks something like this...like these:

Just pick one that you like & roll with it.

For those of you that don't know who the Green Man is, the answer is simple.

You know how the early Christians adopted a lot of Pagan imagery to help ease the conversion?

The Green Man is sorta kinda like that, only he's more Catholic Imagery that the New Age Pagans adopted as a god...you know, because a Catholic representation of the seasons in a Church that served as sort of a three-dimensional calendar...along with a 3D Bible & a sort of history of the religion is a hell of a lot nicer than the actual Pagan Gods.

So there was a winter, spring, summer, & fall man or woman in Catholic churches because that was really an important part of education in an agricultural society that depended on the Catholic church to provide an education.

And thus the Green Man was co-opted by Neopagans that needed a kinder, gentler, deity to fit into a world that had grown too small & safe for Berserkers & Blood Eagles.

The priests in New Age Paganism do NOT need to be castrated to be pure enough to slaughter a cow so their followers can bathe in its blood.

There is absolutely no cow slaughter with the Green Man.

The Green Man is a vegetarian...just like Hitler.

Adopting a Catholic image as a god also means that no human's need to be pinned to a tree & have their skin spread open so that the priests can read their entrails.

What I am trying to say is that the New Age Pagans & the Wiccans know about as much about history as Bill O'Rielly & about as much about theology as Bruce Wilkinson.

Do NOT listen to what they tell you about Halloween.  You will be knee-deep in Bull Shit.

They want you to believe that Samhain was worshiped like this:

And has something to do with this:

And that is exactly what a lot of New Age Christians will have you believe because they associate the Green Man with the devil, despite the fact that he was a seasonal marker on Christian churches from Rome to Scotland & from Constantine to King James.

What I'm saying is that, well, Samhain was really more about this:

And a whole lot of this:

Which, of course, leads to women dressed like this:

And thank God for that.

Anyways, what we know of it today comes from Medieval Ireland, which was, well, Christian.  But it comes from an older tradition that marked the final harvest before winter.

That harvest meant the difference between life & death, because if you didn't harvest enough, you were not going to make it through the winter.

Which also meant that it had a lot to do with honoring the dead because there were years that the harvest wasn't enough & you all knew people that didn't make it through that winter that followed the bad harvest.

But all of this kinda sorta got lost in translation because before the Christians came the Irish didn't have much of a written language that wasn't from the Vikings & everything that was recorded in stone before the Vikings was sort of lost in translation because the Nordic peoples raped & pillaged & settled enough to completely transform Irish Celtic traditions & mythology & even their genetic make-up, which we have already covered.

The Vikings, by the way, looked exactly like this:

 So a lot of the original traditions of Samhain, which we call Halloween got lost in translation & are only being rediscovered because of the Romans that conquered England & had to deal with the fact that Samhain often marked the start of the war season.

And we know this in part because of the Romans & in part because of the Táin Bó Cúailnge which marks Samhain as the off-season Invasion of Ulster because all of the harvesting had already been done & going to war meant that no bodies were being taken from the field.

And we know about this because it was part of the Tuatha Dé Danann which is sorta kinda the official Bible & unofficial history of pre-Christian Ireland.

And this was all written down by the Christian Monks who were trying to wipe the Tuatha Dé Danann out of Ireland.  So, you know, 100% guaranteed accurate with no embellishment whatsoever & certainly nothing inserted or twisted in order to make any of this look bad in the eyes of Christians or compared to Christianity.

So, eventually, over time it moved from a holiday marking the end of the harvest & a celebration remembering those that didn't make it in the years that followed bad harvests or a celebration marking a horrible harvest & the knowledge that many people wouldn't make it through the winter to a celebration celebrating the dead & the underworld & the devil & evil, evil, evil.

And one of the stories has to do with a Mr. Jack O'Lantern that was forced to walk the Earth for an eternity because he got kicked out of Hell & was too bad for Heaven & had to carry a lump of burning coal in a hollowed out gourd that can be found absolutely nowhere in Irish mythology & wasn't even a recorded story until the 19th century when it was lifted from a penny dreadful...which was an easy-reader pulp version of Melmoth the Wanderer which was a reinterpretation of the Wandering Jew which was an interpretation of an even earlier Celtic ghost story.

Full circle on that one.

Forget the shoe, follow the gourd!

And then, in the early 19th century, there was an upswing, a Celtic Revival where the traditions & the history in the Tuatha Dé Danann was further warped to reflect the penny dreadfuls on one side of the debate & then the emerging Neopaganism fad on the other which saw the birth of Wicca & the theft & rewriting of the Green Man.

In either case, what started as a feast to celebrate a harvest that your life depended on, was slowly warped into a feast to celebrate the dead which was then taken by the Wiccans & turned into one of their Sabbats which is now thought, by millions of people to be an actual tradition that is based on fact & not from an image that they borrowed from Catholic Churches.

This was taken a step further by the Catholic Church & turned into All Hallows Day, a holiday made to celebrate not the Saints, but the ancestors that had not the good fortune to make it through the winter without dieing...

...which is actually much closer to the actual Samhain than the Wiccan interpenetration...

...And far closer than the Witchcraft Satan Worshiping born again Christian belief...

At least, in as much as the Catholic holiday of All Souls Day which was later changed to All Saints Day which was later turned to All Hallows Day which was turned into Halloween is a holiday commemorated by a feast in honor of the departed, which was exactly what Samhain was originally celebrating, with the addition of the end-of year harvest.  Which made it like the Irish version of the American Thanksgiving & celebrated for pretty much the exact same reasons.

You know, that you were going to make it through the winter.

But this was warped once more in England when they killed Guy Fawkes on a bonfire for trying to kill a protestant king who was committing a genocide against the Catholics, which we have already covered in a previous post.

It was a holiday presently called Bonfire Day where everyone would dress up as Guy Fawkes, wear the same mask & go door-to-door asking for spare change in mockery of the poor Catholic populations before they burned an effigy of Guy Fawkes at the stake in remembrance of the day that they stopped a man that tried to stop a genocide by blowing up the House of Lords.

When it came to America, however, the mask was replaced by a mask of a monster in reference to a Celtic tradition that was co-opted by the Neopagans as a day celebrating the spirits of the underworld...but only after the monster mask replaced the slutty outfit.

In the Roaring Twenties the tradition really took off & Halloween became a holiday celebrated across the country & intended strictly for adults as it was a holiday made for drinking too much & the slutty costumes that we mentioned at the start of this post.

Even though it was a strictly Catholic Holiday intended to remember the dearly departed that had not preformed the 3 miracles needed become a Saint.

And the Booze & the Sex & the fact that it was Catholic now meant that the WASPS, took their Puritanical & very racist anti-Catholic views & started to claim that the holiday was made by witches & evil, evil, evil, because it was a day that Alan Moore celebrated when he worshiped Satan who was really the Green Man who was an image that the Neopagans burrowed from Catholic Churches.

Which is why, today, in many churches & sometimes even in the more conservative Catholic Churches, Halloween is seen as a day celebrating the Devil & not, well, a Catholic holiday celebrating the people that weren't going to make it through the winter.

That is until World War II.

And everyone was so sick of death that they wanted something wholesome & pure & turned Halloween into a holiday for their children so they could dress up & look cute & exercise trust in a community by going door-to-door asking for candy...like the kids in England did to mock the Catholics on a day that was celebrated because Guy Fawkes failed to stop a genocide.

Which lasted until the Baby Boomers all grew up & carried the dressing up tradition into the adulthood which then turned that two decades of a purely innocent children's holiday into the decadent adult holiday that we were initially celebrating when the United States first started celebrating the Catholic version of Samhain that was warped by Neopaganism & everyone started to drink to much & dress up like sluts...again...

Only this time it was after the kids went out trick-or-treating which was a warped take on the celebration that the British did to celebrate when King James killed all the Catholics in England.

Which the WASPS would largely support, if they knew the history & didn't call it a day to worship the Devil because, you know, they get their history from late night television & not even from Alan Moore (who can tell you all about Guy Fawkes & witches) or, you know, from actual history.

But that is fine with them, because attributing the Holiday to Satan, who they call Sam Hain because the writers of Supernatural are clearly about as factual as the Baptist Church, will prevent their faithful practitioners from celebrating a Catholic Holiday that is intended to come with an ample amount of booze & allow women to dress up as sluts, which for some reason they oppose & don't encourage, which makes no sense to me because women should look at sluts as a positive & not a negative.  Something to strive for.

Savvy?

That's a lot of twists & turns & losts in translations just so we could create a holiday that celebrates near nudity in, you know, one of the colder times of the year.

And it is that cold that makes us all really, REALLY love Halloween, or at least slutty Halloween costumes...which is a word that we are using as a positive & not at all as an insult &, if done right, are thin enough to tell you exactly how cold it is.

I'll leave you with this: