Category: Sparrow Chat

I interrupted the saga of School Bus 13 with a couple of rants I needed to get off my chest. Now that’s done, we return to the kids of Bus 13 with just two more tales of life driving a school bus in a small Mid-West American town.

While mostly, the children provided lots of amusement – though often their antics didn’t seem funny at the time – there were moments of great sadness and pathos as well. The two stories that will end this brief interlude concern a little girl called Christina Holsapple. Christina was typical of so many children in America, those we don’t often hear about, the children of the poor and unemployed. Folk left to struggle with life’s cruelty in places like Hope Estates, and often failing miserably.

All the School Bus 13 stories are true. These last two, in particular, poignantly so.

HOPE(LESS) ESTATES

There’s a trailer park on the outskirts of town. It’s just across a main highway past the ADM factory, and surrounded on three sides by railroad tracks. It’s called “Hope Estates”, after Ezra Hope, the man who owns it. As trailer parks go, it’s not very large – probably two dozen, mostly dilapidated, homes each with an adjoining tiny patch of ground, overgrown with weeds and detritus.

There are two narrow roads through the trailer park, each only accessible by crossing the railroad tracks. All through the night locos shunt trucks back and forth to feed the appetite of the Archer Daniels Midland factory. Ostensibly the place only produces high fructose corn syrup, but huge chimneys belch fumes and ash twenty-four hours a day and a nauseating smell drifts across most of the town.

The driver once asked an old man who lived on Hope Estates whether the fumes concerned him. “Na,” he replied, spitting expertly into the dust at the edge of his trailer, “they say it don’t do no ‘arm to us. Mind – you’ve got to be careful if you own a car – I’ve known the ash to take off paint.”

William Jordan lives on the trailer park, with his mom and “uncle”, and his younger brother, Rashon. William is ten; his brother, six. Just across the way, in another rundown trailer, Christina Holsapple lives with her mom and dad. The three children all attend the same school. They travel on school bus 13. School begins with breakfast at eight forty-five. The kids have lunch provided and can buy hot popcorn from the machine to take home with them. For some it is their only evening meal. The Jordan’s and Holsapple’s don’t get on well. Feuds are common on Hope Estates. Families live too close together; the one commodity they share is struggle.

Christina is nine. She’s a quiet child, always shabbily dressed, clothes in need of a wash and mend. She never speaks, and rides the bus for two months before the driver sees her smile. He bought candy bars for all the kids every Friday afternoon and dished them out as they alighted from the bus. He noted Christina liked one particular type of candy. She would never look at him as he held out the bag of goodies, just root around until she found the one she liked, then turn and run down the steps without a word, or backward glance.

One Friday, as she was about to leave the bus, the driver held out her favored bar and said, “Here, Christina, I saved this one back just for you.” She looked at him with astonishment, then, with the ghost of a smile, whispered, “Thank you,” before turning and running down the steps as though afraid the driver might change his mind and take it away from her.

It’s easy to spot when the Holsapples and Jordans are feuding again. The driver has to take care and separate Christina from the two brothers, or they’ll fight on the bus. Rashon was diagnosed with ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’, but the driver guesses it’s simply lack of love. Once, when Rashon was really naughty and refused to sit in his seat without crawling all over the bus, he gave him pencil and paper and asked the little boy to draw what he saw from the bus window. Rashon never moved from his seat for the whole journey, totally absorbed in his drawing.

The kids from Hope Estates always look tired. Bags hang under their eyes. Trailers don’t insulate well, and the nightly loco shunting is loud and chaotic. It makes the parents edgy, quick to snap at their kids for the slightest misdemeanor. The other day his “uncle” beat Rashon with a strap for playing in the mud. Rashon likes the weekends, when he stays with his dad. His dad lives down by the lake. There are no railroad tracks down by the lake.

Today, the Jordan’s and Holsapple’s are not feuding. All three children look pale and sleep-deprived. They sit quietly in their seats and Rashon is asleep before they’ve left the Estate.The driver carefully edges his vehicle over the railroad tracks and out of the trailer park, past the name sign that reads: “Hope Estates”.

After the word, “Hope,” someone had once scrawled, “less”; but the ash from the ADM factory has almost eaten it away.

The last post was labelled, “The Plain Speaking Truth,” so here’s a bit more plain speaking because I’m frankly angry when honest movements for the betterment of mankind are hijacked by extremists and nutters who just want to deny to the rest of us anything they consider offensive, or more likely gives them a chance at two minutes of fame.

I’m a solid supporter of rights for women; I believe men like Harvey Weinstein should be castrated, but I’m getting tired of the constant ‘pushing of the boundaries’ that certain female elements use for perhaps no other purpose than to make the rest of us feel uncomfortable.

When they start messing around with music, and old romantic classics like, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” then I’ve had enough. Only recently, we hear that a number of radio stations in North America have banned the song from their Christmas playlists.

An Ohio radio station is dropping the Christmas classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” for having “no place” in today’s “extra sensitive” world. ^[1]

“Extra-sensitive,” I prefer the phrase, “Over-sensitive.” And who are these “extra-sensitive” people in North America? I doubt they’re Donald Trump supporters.

“I do realize that when the song was written in 1944, it was a different time, but now while reading it, it seems very manipulative and wrong,” explained Glenn Anderson, a host on Cleveland’s WDOK-FM.

Oh, do me a favour, Anderson, stop ass-crawling! Try reading it as it was meant, not as your pervy little mind chooses to regard it now.

“The world we live in is extra sensitive now, and people get easily offended,” he continues.

Just how many listeners do you have who are “easily offended” Mister Anderson? One Canadian station has pulled the song because ONE woman complained. I’m all for the rights of minorities, but that’s ridiculous. WDOK-FM doesn’t state how many hordes of irate female listeners have stormed their building and wrecked their equipment. I wonder why not.

Written by Frank Loesser and performed by Dean Martin and Marilyn Maxwell, the song is certainly one of our Christmas favourites (though the Louis Jordan/ Ella Fitzgerald version comes mighty close) and if my wife’s well enough it’ll certainly be on our hi-fi over the holidays.

Where does it end? There must be a plethora of old pop songs and standards that could be interpreted as ‘sexist’, or, God help us, predatory. And that’s the crux of the matter, it’s just about how you want to interpret these things. Almost any harmless romantic ballad could be construed as ‘predatory’, if your mind is sufficiently warped to see it that way. Well mine isn’t, and I’m quite sure most sane individuals would agree with me.

Once again the pyramid of public opinion swings wildly out of control, as the extremists take over and attempt to ruin it for everyone.

Get a life, you people, romance is not dead – much as you’d like it to be.

^{[1] “Radio station pulls ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ amid #MeToo movement” NewYork Post, December 4th 2018}

We interrupt this series of shorts on the antics of School Bus 13 to bring you a news bulletin:

GEORGE H.W. BUSH IS DEAD

You may think that a little disrespectful, even cruel. After all, what of his poor grieving family? Shouldn’t they be spared such harshness whilst husband and father is still warm in the mortuary?

For the next however-many-days until this man’s body is finally done away with, in whatever manner his vast fortune has allowed, we will hear nothing but hypocritical bla-bla emanating from the media, world politicians, would-be friends, etc, etc, all blathering of how wonderful he was, what a great man he was, a terrific world leader, (a Statesman, surely?) till anyone even vaguely familiar with the truth surrounding George H.W. Bush will likely puke with disgust.

Let’s start with Afghanistan. When the Russians finally pulled out of that god-forsaken country in 1988-89 George H.W. had just been elected US President. His predecessor, the artful though not very bright Ronald Reagan, with the cooperation of his Vice President (guess who? Yes! George H.W. Bush!), had been supplying arms, including the deadly Stinger missiles, to Osama bin Laden’s Mujaheddin, enabling them to defeat the Russian forces.

Once the Russians had gone, Bush, now the new US president, hailed the Afghan peoples’, “extraordinary triumph of spirit and will,” promising the U.S. would, “remove mines, resettle refugees, and reconstruct Afghanistan’s war-torn economy.”

It never happened. Bush abandoned Afghanistan and its people to their fate. There was no oil in Afghanistan, nor any other commodity useful to the United States. It had simply been used as a pawn in the cold war with Russia. The country rapidly descended into ferocious civil war, only ending when the Taliban gained a tenuous hold and imposed a draconian order. The Islamic fighters who routed the Russians eventually re-formed, became al Qaeda, and a decade later pulled off the greatest terrorist attack ever – 9/11.

Then, there was the Persian Gulf during the Iran/Iraq War when the US couldn’t decide which side they were on, but eventually, if rather surreptitiously, joined up with Saddam Hussein.

On July 3rd 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes, one of America’s most advanced warships, shot down an Airbus A300, while on patrol in the Persian Gulf. Iran Air flight 655, was en route from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai. The aircraft was legitimately flying within its correct flight path, and gaining altitude when the Vincennes, ostensibly mistaking it for an Iranian F-15 fighter diving down in attack mode on the ship, shot it down. Of the 290 passengers and crew – all civilians, and including women and sixty-six children – there were no survivors.

Whether the Vincennes deliberately shot down the airliner is still a matter of conjecture. The tissue of (since proven) lies emanating from the administration and the Vincennes’ captain, Will Rogers III, immediately after the event suggests such may well have been the case. If Rogers had mistakenly slaughtered 290 innocents, normal procedure would surely have involved relief of command and a possible courts martial. As it was, there was no disciplinary action, and Rogers “received a handsome decoration for duties well performed.” The result of the naval investigation concluded, “Iran must bear principal responsibility for the tragedy.”

Both Reagan and Bush denied the US was in any way responsible. Bush, at that time was running for the presidency as Reagan’s second term was drawing to a close. When asked if he would apologise to the Iranians for the incident, he responded:

“I will never apologize for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”

Well, Mister H.W. Bush, I’m not an apologise-for-not-liking-you kind of guy. You and your family between you have been responsible for more killing, more suffering, more war, more torture, and more incarceration without trial, than possibly any other administration in history, with the possible exception of the Third Reich. You and yours were just as “America First and Fuck the Rest,” as Donald Trump is today. The only difference: he’s upfront about it.

The above accounts are just two of many that could be evidenced: Somalia, the Balkans,the Iraqi Kurds, all part of the infamous ‘New World Order’ that you envisaged. An ‘order’ that brought nothing but suffering and death to thousands of your fellow human beings.

I will, therefore, end this bulletin as it began:

GEORGE H.W. BUSH IS DEAD

^{[1] “When Iran Air Flight 655 Was Shot Down By A US Navy Guided Missile Cruiser” War History Online, February 3rd 2018}

^{NOTE: The above link is to probably the most ‘balanced’ account of the incident of Flight 655. There are others, mainly American, giving more US-biased accounts.}