Posted on 08/27/2005 10:02:40 AM PDT by TXBubba
Just talked to Basil on site in Crawford, Texas. Currently there are about 100 folks there helping to set up. They have not received word about the caravan arrival in Waco yet. JimRob is riding with the caravan. She thinks it might get to Crawford around 1:00 p.m.
Basil says the stage is set up, the sound system is excellent and they have hung the most beautiful banners overnighted by W04Man on the stage. A big thanks for the banners, they are much appreciated!
Someone arrived early and hung yellow ribbons everywhere.
They have an American flag that is about 50 feet by 40 feet. Children of military personnel serving in the Middle East have written notes to their parents on the stripes of this flag. A very touching thing to behold.
The HOT Chapter booth is being unloaded right now. The will sell buttons made by Angelwood to help off set costs.
Someone rented the Community Center for our use so there is access to AC. However, they also have 10 tents set up. And there is a Moonwalk for the kiddos.
To top everything else there is BBQ on the grill! Basil is the official taster and says it is great!
That is all the news I have at the moment. It is hard to get a cell phone connection to Crawford but when I hear more I will try to update everyone.
It's over? They travel across country for a week and then can't stay for more than a couple of hours???
I haven't been on line long but what is this about an arrest? Did they get violent?
If they knew all of this about you, they would understand why you can't stand to see any photos of those we oppose. I lost my good behavior star today myself, when I called Medea Benjamin an evil bitch earlier. Oops! Did I do it again?
Nobody, thank you for all you do to help fight the evil moonbats' attempts to turn this into another Vietnam.
P.S. Albion Wilde and I are working on the After Action Report for WRAMC demonstration. And Gadsden man is going to send me his photos, after he sorts through them. His photo gear ROCKS! And all I have is my Halliburton camera and depleted uranium tripod.
;-)
You guys must not be old enough to remember the John Ford movie, starring John Wayne, made in 1949. The title was "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon".
The words to the song are at:
http://www.ezfolk.com/lyrics/qrst/s/she-wore-a-yellow-ribbon/she-wore-a-yellow-ribbon.html
Everyone, email Britt Hume. He's one of the BIG cheeses there.
Special@foxnews.com
Angry does that to a person.
That was great, might work, playing catch up on this thread. Still laughing at that one.
I'm comin' home, I've done my time
Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine
If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free
Then you'll know just what to do
If you still want me
If you still want me
Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
It's been three long years
Do ya still want me (still want me)
If I don't see a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
Bus driver, please look for me
'cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison
And my love, she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please
Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
It's been three long years
Do ya still want me (still want me)
If I don't see a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree
---- Instrumental Interlude ----
Now the whole damned bus is cheerin'
And I can't believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons 'round the ole oak tree
I'm comin' home, mmm, mmm
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
(Tie a ribbon 'round the ole oak tree)
She has had her meeting. Now she needs to get psychiatric help.
She needs to go home, and ..oh wait, her husband doesn't want her around either.
Never mind, you mindless idiot....
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html
During the last decade, no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquiries than the yellow ribbon. The questions began in 1981 when the Library of Congress received a blizzard of inquiries, particularly from the news media, about the history of yellow ribbons then being displayed everywhere in America in support of Americans being held hostage in Iran. The basic question that reporters had in mind was how the symbol came into being. Many callers had ideas of their own on the subject; some had interviewed the authors of relevant popular songs; others had spoken to wives of hostages in Iran in 1980-81. Still others had talked to historians of the Civil War.
Eventually a body of information accumulated, and I wrote an article for Folklife Center News entitled "Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Tradition" (volume IV, no. 2, April 1981). The article outlined the symbolic use of the ribbons in story, song, and real life; and the Folklife Center staff made good use of the article this year [1991], ten years after its publication, when a second blizzard of questions came in about the ribbons displayed for soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf.
Is the custom of displaying yellow ribbons for an absent loved-one a genuine American tradition? That question was, and remains, "number one" on the American Folklife Center's hit parade of yellow ribbon reference inquiries. Often this same question has been asked in a more focused form: People will say, "Is this a Civil War tradition?" --as if an association with that central experience in American history would certify its authenticity.
In the last year or so, we of the reference staff at the Center have become aware of a certain shift: a movement from asking about a Civil War connection to asserting one. Some assertions on this subject have verged on the pugnacious; nearly all have made reference to the song "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." That song was recorded for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1938 by Sidney Robertson Cowell in California, but it is much older. For example, there is a Philadelphia printing from 1838 that copies still older British versions. Indeed in the last act of Othello, Desdamona sings one of the song's lyric ancestors.
One version or another of "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" has been popular now for four hundred years; so it would not surprise me to learn that someone sang it sometime during the Civil War. All I can say for sure, however, is that it was sung in a movie that was set in the western United States at a time just after the Civil War--a 1949 release starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru. In fact, Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (the movie) took its title from the song. This film remains the only demonstrable connection between yellow ribbons and the Civil War that has come to my attention, and that a rather weak one.
If the custom of wearing or decorating with or displaying yellow ribbons doesn't trace to the Civil War, where does it come from? It begins, as far as I can tell, not as a custom at all, and not as a song. It begins as a folk tale--a legend, actually. Here it is in the earliest version I've found:
It is the story of two men in a railroad train. One was so reserved that his companion had difficulty in persuading him to talk about himself. He was, he said at length, a convict returning from five years' imprisonment in a distant prison, but his people were too poor to visit him and were too uneducated to be very articulate on paper. Hence he had written to them to make a sign for him when he was released and came home. If they wanted him, they should put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood close to the railroad track at the bottom of the garden, and he would get off the train, but if they did not want him, they were to do nothing and he would stay on the train and seek a new life elsewhere. He said that they were nearing his home town and that he couldn't bear to look. His new friend said that he would look and took his place by the window to watch for the apple tree which the other had described to him.
In a minute he put a hand on his companion's arm. "There it is," he cried. "It's all right! The whole tree is white with ribbons."
That passage comes from, of all places, a 1959 book on prison reform. The title is Star Wormwood, and it was written by the eminent Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok. Bok says it was told to him by Kenyon J. Scudder, first superintendent of Chino penitentiary. I take this information as evidence that the story was in oral tradition as early as the mid-1950s. I note also the implication of a certain occupational interest in the tale.
During the 1960s, the returning prisoner story appeared in religious publications and circulated in oral tradition among young people active in church groups. In this environment, both the versions that appeared in print and those collected from oral tradition highlighted similarities to the New Testament "Parable of the Prodigal Son."
In October of 1971, Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.
In June of 1972, nine months later, The Readers Digest reprinted "Going Home." Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. One month-and-a-half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hamill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.
One factor that may have influenced Hamill's decision to do so was that, in May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled, BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times--that's seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hamill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written.
In January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, festooned her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from jail. The event was televised on the evening news (one of the viewers was Penne Laingen). And thus a modern folk legend concerning a newly released prisoner was transformed into a popular song, and the popular song, in turn, transformed into a ritual enactment. Notice that Jeb Stuart Magruder's return to his home exactly parallels the situation in both the folk narrative and the popular song. The new development, at this point, was that Gail Magruder put the story into action.
The next big step was to make the ribbon into an emblem--not for the return of a forgiven prodigal--but for the return of an imprisoned hero. And that step was Penne Laingen's: On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held Ambassador Bruce Laingen and the rest of the embassy staff hostage.
Six weeks later, on December 10, the Washington Post printed two short articles by Barbara Parker: "Coping With `IRage'" and "Penne Laingen's Wait." The first article began "Americans are seething" and went on to quote psychologists concerning the widespread and intense emotional distress caused by the hostage crisis. The article presented a helpful list of things to do to "vent irage": "ring church bells at noontime . . . organize a neighborhood coffee to discuss the crisis and establish one ground rule only: no physical violence . . . play tennis and `whack the hell' out of the ball . . . offer family prayers or moments of silence . . . turn on car headlights during the day . . . send gifts to the needy `in the name of the hostages,'" and, of course, the old stand-by, "conduct candlelight vigils."
Then in the Post article come the words "Laingen, who has 'tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree'. . . suggests that as something else others might do." The article concludes with Penne Laingen saying, "So I'm standing and waiting and praying . . . and one of these days Bruce is going to untie that yellow ribbon. It's going to be out there until he does." According to my current understanding, this is the first announcement that the yellow ribbon symbol had become a banner through which families could express their determination to be reunited.
The next major step was to move the ribbon out of the Laingen's front yard and into most of the front yards in the United States. That move came about in a particularly American way. With a wonderful exhibition of the spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was a cardinal virtue of our society, the hostage families met and formed an association: the Family Liaison Action Group (FLAG). FLAG quickly found allies among existing humanitarian organizations, most notably an organization called No Greater Love.
The goal of FLAG and its allies was to find a way to bring moral force to bear on behalf of the hostages. They seem to have formed their strategy around Emerson's maxim that "A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands." The symbol they choose for their argument was, of course, the yellow ribbon. Aided by support from four AFL-CIO unions, No Greater Love made and distributed ten thousand "yellow ribbon pins." These went to union members, members of hostage families, college students, and in a stroke of marketing genius, to TV weather forecasters. Meanwhile FLAG sent the pins to Junior Chambers of Commerce, scouting organizations, and governors' wives.
Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve.
And it is evolving still. During the Persian Gulf Crisis, for example, there emerged a new impulse to combine yellow ribbons with hand-painted signs, American flags, conventional Christmas ornaments, seasonal banners, and other such elements to create elaborate, decorative displays--displays that one scholar has termed "folk assemblages."
Because the yellow ribbon is very much a living tradition, there is no way to tell who among us may help to steer its course, or in what direction. Last winter, I was in a distant city and needed to buy a spray of flowers. I found a flower shop and explained to the proprietress that I needed an arrangement that would be appropriate for a cemetery ornament. "And would you like some yellow ribbon to tie around it," she asked matter-of-factly.
Well, it's a long way from a folktale about an ex-convict's homecoming to an incipient funeral custom. I had to stop and think about that for a minute. But never one to thwart the evolution of a new American custom, I said, "Yes, ma'am. I will take some yellow ribbon. Thank you."
Hey, why didn't you keep JR on the correct road when he pasted out your way. I heard he got lost...... lol.
In a liberal sort of way
In a liberal sort of way
That is the one thing about this Fox unseemly "turnaround". They and we encourage the Troops to watch Fox News, and then they abandon them by running all the Cindy Trash in for weeks on end. They have had very little coverage of the Pro-Troops stuff, INCLUDING TODAY. WELL, THEY HAVE A FEW DAYS GRACE THEN I'M GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE!! AGAINST FOX TO MAKE THEM PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THEIR BASE.
So, that's tomorrow, right?
All the MSM talking heads are blabbering on about Katrina. Fox has not even mentioned Crawford while I have been watching.
I spent election night here there was a live thread going so fast it made one dizzy. Ther were over 12000 posts by the time I went to bed, and they were going up sooo fast you could only skim the REAL info coming in, especially from Ohio, we had much better info than any newz organization and MUCH faster.
Thanks, I sent off an email
There was a John Wayne movie - calvary - Wild West.
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