In his world, right made might. On doing good, Civilization stood.
. . . . .
Click pics to enhance text for reading.The Editors
Captain Bryce Lee (USN) on his 85th birthday.Billy Lee read a version of his poem, Warrior, to his father at his party. Bryce never said he liked it. The Billy Lee Editorial Board
Bryce Lee helped stand-up the National Security Agency in the 1950s when the agency helped track atom bomb materials and components loaded aboard foreign ships.
He played a prominent role during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he led an anti-submarine jet-helicopter squadron based near the confrontation.
Because of their sensitive nature, some of the Captain’s accomplishments will never be known outside of government.
Bryce spoke Russian and French. In his mind, integrity was the most important quality a person could have. He did well for a farm boy from Michigan.
Bryce Lee passed peacefully at home with family present a few days before his 91st birthday in 2011.
The Billy Lee Editorial Board
In his world, right made might. On doing good, Civilization stood.
[A New Year’s Message to our readers from the Editorial Board]
January 17, 2015 marks the first anniversary of the Billy Lee Pontificator. During the past year we published more than fifty posts on over thirty topics of interest to Billy Lee — like economics, history, humor, politics, religion, gay rights, literature, race, music, culture, technology, science and many others.
Billy Lee celebrates his blog’s one-year anniversary.
WordPress, our blog-site administrator, reported in year-end statistical summariesthat readers clicked on Billy Lee’s Pontifications 7,000 times.
Although some people might consider the number small compared to the tens-of-thousands of hits received each day by commercial web-sites, Billy Lee prefers to compare his numbers to what he might expect were his articles posted on the front of his refrigerator with little door-magnets.
It’s unlikely that more than a handful of visitors to his kitchen would take the time to read even a few of his posts during the year. Measured this way, it is clear to the Editorial Board that the Billy Lee Pontificator has been a spectacular success.
Billy Lee sometimes tells people he started his blog to entertain and inform readers. Not true. We know him. We work with him. He created his blog, because he needed a reservoir for his crazy ideas.
Billy intends to leave behind a public anthology of utter nonsense to his loved ones. He is convinced that the heart-palpitations he experiences every time he writes will kill him someday, probably prematurely. He doesn’t want to leave an empty legacy of a wasted life.
But let us face some harsh realities. Writing a blog is agonizing, thankless work. A famous person once said: no one who blogs is ever happy (or famous). Bloggers can sometimes suffer criticism, but more often than not, people ignore them. And it hurts.
The public seems not to care about bloggers and the useless self-indulgent crap they write. Blogsters who believe in what they do (and that includes Billy Lee) writhe beneath the stab-wounds of rejection every time they push the publish-button and sit glued to their computers to wait anxiously for their site-stats to dribble-in.
Most of the time the numbers confirm their worst fears — they really do suck at what they do. They bleed. They suffer. And everyone knows they self-inflict their own self-righteous agonies.
No one does it better than Billy Lee. Only when a blogger stops blogging, does the bleeding stop. Billy Lee has suffered and bled for twelve months now. Yes, he bleeds, but no, he’s never bled-out.
It seems that more and more blogsters are abandoning their sites and moving on to other meaningless projects. We hope Billy Lee never does. As boring and irrelevant as he is, we still want our paychecks! Stand up, Billy Lee. Keep on blogging!
Sincerest Regards,
The Editorial Board
P.S. One more thing. Some readers may have heard the news by now. Security guards arrested Billy Lee during his speech last night at the “New Year’s Eve Homage to Year One” Gala and Ball. The Board hosted the plaid T-shirt affair at the exclusive Rubber Chicken Dinner Club in Metamora.
Billy Lee has apologized.
Guess what?
We don’t care!
A transcript of his remarks is reproduced below.
Helloooo, everybody! Happy New Year!
(burps loudly, spills drink)
(audience applause)
I’m Billy Lee, the Pontificator, and I’m drunk as a skunk!
(Audience laughter, applause)
What’s my New Year’s Resolution for 2015? Who wants to know? Yeah? Oh yeah? You’re all a bunch of gnarly swamp rabbits…That’s what I think! I’ll pickle ur… Whoaaa! Easy big fella. Not you. Not you.
(Scattered laughter. Room quiets)
Ok, Ok… it’s an easy one, my comrades. Hold on. I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya.
(Stares wildly into the room)
I resolve… I resolve… in two-thousand one five… to be sexy all the time! Two – oh – one – five! I be sexy all de time. Yeah!
(hiccups, burps, takes a drink)
(gasps from audience, a few catcalls)
I resolve to be of good cheer, most of the year, and for god sakes don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(stumbles, grabs podium)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(twirls a 360 and throws drink glass, shattering it)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(falls into microphone setting off loud reverb)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(sprawls onto stage floor, face down, butt in the air)
don’t tell ’em… don’t tell ’em…
(scattered screams, folks covering their ears, expressions of outrage in audience)
Note to our readers: Let’s just say, things escalated. Billy Lee decided to belt out a slurred and soggy rendition of Take Me to Church. He demanded that male volunteers come up on stage to kiss him on the lips.
Some in the audience rioted. People began throwing things, including chairs and salt shakers. Finally, marshals stormed in to escort BillyLee out of the building. He was hand-cuffed and dragged. He began bawling like a baby. Some say he mouthed the words, worship like a dog! worship like a dog! as the marshals threw him into the paddy-wagon.
An hour or so later, members of the Editorial Board — they shall remain unnamed — posted BillyLee’s bond, and all of us, together, asked that he submit his formal remarks — in writing — today. We demanded that he include an apology.
Billy Lee complied. We have attached his written “homage” (an e-mail) below. The Editorial Board.
January 1, 2015
To: the Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
May I offer my profoundest apologies to anyone I offended last night by my outrageous behavior, inappropriate comments, and lewd singing? I am so sorry.
I am so ashamed.
I know it’s the tradition for people to drink small amounts of alcohol on New Year’s Eve, but last night I clearly exceeded the reasonable and customary limits of insobriety.
Under the influence of what some said was “excessive” consumption of liquor, it seems I offended both the gay community and those Christians in the audience who prefer to drive gays to suicide. For this, I am truly sorry. I said and sang stuff I didn’t mean.
My question to the board members is this: Can you forgive me? Or will you use my weakness as your excuse to torment, humiliate, scandalize, censor, and shun me?
Your silence seems to speak for itself. You forgive me. And you torment, humiliate, scandalize, censor, and shun me. Thank you so very much.
Let me reassure you. I am not myself gay, nor have I ever been. Do you believe me? Again, your silence speaks for itself.
You don’t believe me. I feel it.
And you shun me. I feel that, too. Ok, then. Now that it’s settled, can we move on?
And again, may I prodigiously apologize for playing the fool and making you hate me?
I am grateful for each of you: for each member of our illustrious Editorial Board and the over-weighted bureaucracy that supports you and makes up the backbone of the Pontificator team.
Thank you to the staff of sycophants, apple polishers, and suck-ups who inspire all of us to do our best work.
And thanks also to our black janitor and the two sluts who hang out in the parking-lot before work every morning. Thank you to everyone.
It is now my pleasure to present my homage to our first year and to discuss many of the articles I wrote that might have enriched all our lives had you taken the time to read them.
It’s no secret to me that you didn’t read my articles. Yet you call yourselves the “Editorial Board” !!! The only thing you edit is your paychecks. I’ve caught more than one of you erasing “ones” and “twos” and writing in “eights” and “nines”. It’s not right, people. Can’t you see that?
Well, enough apologies. I’m admonished and chastised. I get it. And no. I’m not dropping my pants, so you can spank me. It’s enough, already, Editorial Board! Let’s move on to my Homage to Year One!
I’ve included the following written transcript of the remarks I would have made last night had I not been drunk. And I made some changes to more accurately express my feelings after your reaction to last night’s sorry debacle and my role in it.
By the way, I’m thrilled to reveal the five most read Pontificator articles for 2014. Can you guess? They are… (May we have the envelope, please? Drum roll…)
Since you’re reading this report in your e-mail, Editorial Board, click on the links and read all five, right now!
The best article of 2014 (and far and away my favorite) is Bell’s Inequality. It packs a huge wallop for those who dig science. Not to totally pander to science freaks, but a close second is Conscious Life. Site stats say few people have read them. I know the Editorial Board didn’t read them.
Read them now!
Our best (worst) day of the year was May 3rd, when church leaders — alarmed by my famous Gay Love post — swarmed our site and eventually shut it down — for six weeks!
I never suffered emotionally in my life like I did during those weeks — they turned into months! Details of that unnerving fiasco are described and preserved in Writing Free.
Of course, I can’t expect any of you to read it. It’s 2,000 words. It has paragraphs!
Many people told me the post they liked best was Hearing Loss. It is a true account of real-life exchanges between me and my hill-billy wife, Beverly Mae. It is always good for giddy guffaws and lots of laughs. Next July, when you are all taking your six-week vacations, why not set one week aside to read it, Editorial Board?!
Another funny post, at least to me: Why Do Humans like Music? I belly-laugh every time I revisit it. It’s that good. You wouldn’t know!!!
I don’t know how many of you Board members know this, but The Billy Lee Pontificator got it’s start, believe it or not, from a desire to showcase an article I wrote titled, Horemheb, Exodus Pharaoh? I loved that essay. I loved the title. Wow. Horemheb, Exodus Pharaoh? Really? Everybody will read that one!
To my amazement, and through the tears of self-humiliation, I discovered — after I published it on my blog-site — Horemheb needed a re-write. Some family members may remember how much the re-writing of Horemheb dragged-on during its prolonged infancy on Facebook, before I blog-published it. It’s why we hired our Editorial Board team.
Maybe someday some of the Editorsmight want to read Horemheb to see if I missed something. If it’s not inconvenient or too much trouble, Editorial Board!!!
Anyway, sloppy execution of my article, Horemheb, led to the policy elucidated on our Billy Lee Process Page, best summarized as follows: re-write it ’till it’s right. People hate the policy, but I like it. In my bad heart, I know it’s right. And since my Editorial Board — yes, that’s you! — won’t spell check my stuff, I have no choice.
To sum-up: I can’t say I enjoyed my first year blogging, but I’m proud of the articles I wrote. I’m glad some people say they read them — even if my Editorial Board refuses. I regret the controversies, but it’s how we stay alive, stay engaged and grow. Does anyone agree?
The entertainment industry learned a long time ago that the way to appeal to the most people is to embrace ambiguity.
Ambiguity permits each consumer to put their own meaning on the art they buy; on music, paintings, theater, books, movies, shows, personalities, and stars.
Ambiguity, when combined with strictly enforced copyright laws — like those of the United States — can help establish a large paying audience, huge money, and wide-spread exposure and influence.
No facial expression is more ambiguous or popular than that of Mickey Mouse. It is vigorously protected by copy-right law.
People like to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. Ambiguity promotes mass participation in cultural processes. This mass participation can alleviate the ennui of alienation for many people.
Elvis Presley created mass hysteria in the USA. Some religious people thought his first name was a scrambled version of the word, Evils.
Elvis Presley sang, you ain’t nothing but a hound dog. What did he mean by it? No one knows, and everyone knows.
The same is true with Bob Dylan who sang, Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me. In the jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following you. No one knows what he was singing about. Yet everyone can tell you what he meant.
The ambiguity of these two artists — one from the nineteen-fifties, one from the nineteen-sixties — permitted both to accumulate the largest fan bases ever, until the Beatles.
John Lennon once said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
The Beatles established an ambiguous sexual identity by wearing their hair long — unusual at the time. They deluged their fans with ambiguous lyrics such as, yeah, you’ve got that something, I think you’ll understand, When I’ll say that something, I wanna hold your hand… and hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. No one knows for sure what they meant, but everyone knows what those lyrics meant to themselves when they first heard them.
Jesus presents ambiguities about himself which have attracted the largest following of worshippers in world history. The most obvious ambiguity is the concept of the Trinity. Is Jesus God, or not? No one knows. Everyone knows.
The Trinity is the central ambiguity of Christianity. God is somehow a combination of person, spirit, and creator.
The concept of the Trinity presents the central ambiguity of Christianity. It has drawn the attention of a spiritually hungry world for two thousand years. It confounds us with a dilemma of logic and meaning which to this day fuels the faith-wars of Christians who, in their quest for certainty, have segregated themselves into over 40,000 denominations.
Every attempt to define the Trinity, to remove its ambiguity and establish certainty, seems to result in a new denomination, a new religion.
The Holy Spirit is sometimes portrayed as a white dove. The olive branch recalls the dove who gave Noah the evidence that the great flood (of judgment) was over.
Of course, many other ambiguities in the Bible have spawned controversies. Abortion isn’t mentioned in the Bible — and homosexuality is barely mentioned — yet both have divided countless churches. Gifts of the Holy Spirit — which are discussed at length in the Bible and should be non-controversial to believers — have divided churches. Some denominations discount gifts altogether, in contradiction to Scripture.
In the 21st century, those Christians who detest ambiguity and worship certainty war with one another in a kind of theater of the absurd. 40,000 denominations?
Really?
Instead of embracing a small amount of ambiguity to unify Christians, a few leaders advocate from time to time certainties of thought and Bible interpretation which divide the faithful. Unity is the last thing these modern Christians seem to want. They lust for certainty.
Certainty is not foundational, according to quantum physics.
Certainty is not biblical, it’s not Christian, it’s not even Jesus. Jesus didn’t stone the woman caught having sex with her married boyfriend, though the logic of the law demanded it. He reasoned with her, encouraged her, and forgave her. He wasn’t logical. He wasn’t dogmatic. He admonished the woman and gave her hope. He acted with all the stupidity and uncertainty of true love, based on a relationship with a messy human being who would never be certain of anything.
The most unambiguous statement Jesus made was this: Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
No one knows for sure what Jesus was talking about when he made this statement. Yet everyone seems to know for sure what he meant. As unambiguous as the statement is, it can’t be literally true today.
No modern person has ever opened their front door and found Jesus standing on the front porch. Not one. Jesus’s meaning is uncertain. To different people, his words mean different things.
For Jesus, his statement had a meaning known to him, but it seems reasonable that his meaning might have nuances depending on the specific person he was talking to. And Jesus was talking to a lot of people, it turned out.
The amount of faith required to access Heaven is small, but uncertain.
The Bible plainly says that we are saved by faith. But no one has perfect faith.
So how much faith does it take to get into Heaven?
Jesus said the amount of faith required to do anything was on the order of a grain of mustard seed, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. How many people have this much faith? Not very many, it turns out. It’s not possible for us to be certain about the quantity of faith required to enter heaven. The amount is small, but uncertain.
In their demand for certainty, many churches fight over doctrine. They fight, because they are populated by people. If history is a guide, we can say with certainty that people love to fight.
One of the amazing things Jesus said was this: God is kind to the wicked and the ungrateful. As someone who has been wicked and ungrateful pretty much everyday of my life (and not proud of it), I love pondering those words. They give me assurance, not certainty, that God will be more gentle with me than I deserve.
God protects the boat and the people it leaves behind in the harbor.
Recently, my church friends, God love them, voted to leave our mainstream denomination to join a conservative denomination of the South, born in the Confederacy of the civil war. People unwilling to get on the boat for unchartered waters face the danger of becoming spiritually adrift. They face an uncertainty that might result in the loss of their religion.
I am one of those who have to face the unpleasant decision to get on that boat or face the dangers of remaining on shore. It’s not a good choice for me. My health has suffered under the stress of a change in my old age I didn’t see coming. The good part is this: people who love Jesus are in the departing boat and on the shore. And Jesus is protecting both the boat and the land it leaves behind.
Sharing a meal with Jesus, and being reassured by him that everything will be set right someday, is a central hope of most Christians.
The comfort Christians enjoy is Jesus, himself, in their homes, eating with them and sharing their life. That’s it. Jesus is all there is for those of us who suffer in this life, and he’s enough. Inside our private spaces, Jesus reasons with us, encourages us, forgives us, admonishes us, and gives us hope. He helps us endure and embrace the will of God, which is almost never our own.
Billy Lee
Postscript: On July 1, 2015 Billy Lee resigned his church and aligned himself with a non-denominational congregation. The Editorial Board.
In 1958 when I was a fourth grader our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island where my dad was soon promoted to lead HS-11, one of the Navy jet-helicopter squadrons defending the east coast from attack by Russian submarines.
We moved to Quonset Point with some trepidation because Hoskins Park — the housing project for military families in those days (now sold, redeveloped, and renamed Wickford Point) — had a long waiting list; we didn’t know where we would live or if we could afford off-base housing.
As it turned out, we got a lucky break. A Navy Lieutenant — who was a Negro — moved his family into Hoskins Park. Some white officers found out and decided their families weren’t going to live in non-segregated housing. As a result, vacancies popped-up, and we got in; we moved-in next door to the Negro officer and his family.
In 1958, my family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Inexpensive on-base housing was overcrowded. We didn’t know where we would live, or if we could afford to live anywhere.
Lieutenant Brown, his wife and two daughters, lived in the two-story, condo-style apartment on the other side of a thin concrete wall from us.
Despite the custom that white and black families didn’t fraternize in those days, eventually I had encounters, conversations, and interactions with all the members of the Brown family.
Over time, I came to understand how traumatized they were, each in their own way, living in a country that, basically, isolated and mistreated them.
My parents accepted an invitation to the Brown’s for dinner — an event that had all the drama of the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released nine years later, in 1967.
One encounter involved my parents. The Browns invited them for dinner to get acquainted, and after agonizing about it, Mom and Dad accepted. I think Dad wanted to check them out; to make sure his kids would be “safe” living next door.
After the meal, Dad reported that the Lieutenant’s wife, Jean (Alston), was a good cook, but he couldn’t shake a queasy feeling in his stomach, which spoiled his appetite. He had never interacted with negroes, except servants(everyone called black people negroes in the 1950s); he certainly had not eaten food at the same table. And, unlike my dad, Mr. Brown was a graduate of the Naval Academy.
In that sense, the lieutenant kind of outranked him. According to dad, Academy graduates favored one another and worked hard to help each other achieve promotions. They put non-Academy graduates (like dad) to great disadvantage in the competition for rank, which was fierce inside the Navy.
A black Academy graduate presented a dilemma. Brown was a graduate of the elite Naval Academy with all its privileges and protections; at the same time, he belonged to a race that was, to put it politely, undervalued both by the Navy and the country at large. It was unfamiliar terrain for dad and made him uncomfortable. I remember my parents writing a thank-you note to the Brown’s for their hospitality but as far as I know, they didn’t return an invitation.
Another incident occurred a few weeks later that changed the way I thought about people and what they sometimes go through. It happened on a day when my fourth-grade teacher decided to punish me for violation of good-citizenship. I sassed her, she claimed, because I insisted — in a loud voice before classmates — she couldn’t tell me what to do!She wasn’t my parent!
In my mind, it made sense. To show how wrong I was, she kept me after school to clean the blackboard. She forced me to practice my reading. I left school an hour late.
When I arrived home, I saw Billie — Lieutenant Brown’s sixth-grade daughter — standing on her porch a few feet from ours, crying, and shifting back and forth on her feet in a puddle of — I took a second look to be sure — her own pee. I couldn’t believe it; I didn’t know what to say or do. I ran inside our condo to tell mom.
I wish I could say that Mom brought Billie into our place, helped her clean-up, and gave her a secure place to wait until her mom got home with a key. But mother did nothing like that. Instead, she became animated and began to marvel about how such an embarrassing calamity could befall a sweet girl like Billie. I became annoyed. Why didn’t she ask us? I interrupted. We would have let her use our bathroom!
Maybe she was afraid to ask, mom said. Maybe she was afraid we would say, no.
So afraid she let her stomach burst? I yelled.
1957. Daisy Bates tries to enter Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to rescue her and eight other students from angry whites. It was the following year that our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Some weeks after, I stood alone in the playground behind our building when Billie walked up. We didn’t speak but sat down together on the ground to draw pictures in the gray clay beneath us — clay the housing complex we shared was built on.
It didn’t seem right to sit with someone and not talk but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Billie was a couple of years older. We had little in common, it seemed. We concentrated for a while, in silence, on our art.
Then, she looked up. She fixed her eyes on mine. I didn’t look away. I tried to hold her gaze. Finally, she whispered. She said simply, I hate being colored.
I felt the blood drain from my face. Hate was a bad word. We didn’t use the word hate in our family.
To hear Billie whisper, hate, about herself — hate about something she had no control over or responsibility for, which she couldn’t change, wish away, or escape — upended my internal world. In that moment, the ground shifted beneath my feet.
Somehow, hearing her speak those words — and the mental image I had created in my memory of the day she danced in a pool of her own urine — conflated in my mind. As Billie waded ankle-deep in her own bodily fluids, I heard her screaming. I hate being colored!!! I hate it!! I hate it!I hate it.
In my imagination, I took my place beside her. I raged against God and all the earth for making her colored; for allowing white people to be so insensitive, so mean, so un-caring, so ill-tempered, so prejudiced.
—————
Billie’s father supervised a motor-pool near, but outside, the Quonset Point military base. According to friends of my mom, he was some kind of gas-station attendant. One warm day, he saw me playing outside and asked if I wanted to take a ride with him in his new convertible. I said sure.
He said he wanted to show me something. He was in charge of something and wanted to show me what it was. He wanted to show me what he did.At his work.
I thought, this is a crazy request. After all, I didn’t know what my own dad did. He’d never taken me to work or showed me anything having to do with what he was about when he wasn’t home.
So, I climbed into Mr. Brown’s convertible, top down, and off we went. It turned out that he was good at small talk. I listened happily to his resonant voice and enjoyed the sun and warm breezes as we rambled along. We passed through some old guard shacks, a few barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences, and entered an area so remote and wild, it was hard to believe we were still in Rhode Island.
We drove through a dense grove of trees and up onto a hill. Mr. Brown slowed the car and stopped. The sun blazed into the open convertible. Look, he said. He frowned, then nudged my shoulder and pointed. Look down there.
There were more military vehicles under Navy Lieutenant Brown’s command than I imagined there were cars in the entire world. This photo of a military motor-pool in a western state reminds me of what I saw in Rhode Island.
Below us for as far as my eyes could see, in a valley that stretched to the very edge of Earth, sat thousands of green and gray trucks and jeeps; armored personnel carriers and tanks; military vehicles of every stripe and size, all neatly parked in long straight lines. As a naive fourth grader, I found the view hard to take in. There lay spread below us more vehicles than I imagined existed in the entire world.
It was the second time a member of the Brown family stunned me. I was speechless. Then I said, you’re in charge of all of those trucks? Navy Lieutenant Brown smiled, sadly, I thought, then looked at me like Billie had.
I am, he said.
Billy Lee
Editor’s Postscript: This story is grounded in the memories of a fourth grader of events that occurred almost sixty years ago. The make of Mr. Brown’s car and the nature of the installation visited may or may not be accurate.
After writing this article, Billy Lee learned that Mr. Brown, sadly, passed away on May 22, 2012, at age 85 from cancer. After reading old press releases, he discovered that historian Robert J. Schneller had published a book in 2005 about Mr. Brown’s experiences at the Naval Academy called Breaking the Color Barrier. In 1949, it turns out, Midshipman Brown became the school’s first black graduate.
Unknown to Billy Lee, Wesley Brown had become an historical figure. Billy Lee has asked the Editors to add biographical notes to his post.
In 1958, neither Billy Lee nor Mr. Brown’s neighbors knew that the young Naval officer owned the distinction of being the first black midshipman to graduate from the Naval Academy. In the racial climate of the 1950’s, an achievement like Mr. Brown’s would have been seen as the exception that proved the rule: Negroes were inferior. It would have been bad taste in polite society to call attention to Lieutenant Brown’s achievement.
None of Wesley’s neighbors, Billy Lee recalls, had any idea of the hell he went through to become a Naval officer. In any event, white people in 1958 were so blinded by racism that they would have thought, had they known: Wesley’s accomplishment was of no consequence; it was not worth mentioning or even thinking about.
It’s hard to believe now, but white Americans in 1958 didn’t know their country had a race problem.
Wesley Brown was the first black graduate of the Naval Academy. Because no white midshipmen would share a room with him, he lived alone during the four years it took to earn his engineering degree. When classmates blocked his admission to the academy choir, Wesley joined the cross-country track team where future President and upperclassman, Jimmy Carter, befriended him.
Wesley Brown became the first black American to survive the racial hazing at the Naval Academy and graduate. I knew him to be a happy person with a charitable attitude toward all people. He was a kind and gentle neighbor who, during the year of 1958, made me feel good each time I saw or spent time with him.
His wife, Jean (Alston), led our church choir and taught me to sing. We did a television show under her direction. His daughter, Willetta (Billie), transformed my view of the world with a single sentence. I read somewhere that Carol, the youngest daughter, did well in life.
After our families parted ways, Wesley’s family grew to include sons. Eventually, Wesley Brown and Jean divorced; Wesley married Crystal Malone in 1963. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before retiring in 1969 to pursue other interests.
As my story tells, it was racism in the Navy that made it possible for me to know the Browns. Midshipman Wesley Brown changed America for the better. He suffered to accomplish it, but he kept his pain to himself and his closest friends.
I am proud to say that once, I knew Wesley Brown and he knew me.
In an effort to bring common sense to government, citizens of the United States voted yesterday to restore control of the Senate and House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Barack Hussein Obama, the Kenyan usurper — the first modern president to misplace his birth certificate — called the vote, idiotic.
Kenyan Usurper Barack Obama (KUBO)
Republicans have vowed to quickly demonstrate their ability to lead by promising to impeach both President Obama and VP Joe Biden so that sobbing John Boehner — the House Majority Leader (and next in line) — can ascend to the Oval Office.
Boehner, for his part, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and return health-care in America to what it has always been — unaffordable.
Sobbing John Boehner
The Grand Old Party promised to eliminate taxes on anyone earning over one-million dollars per year to “free up the economy” and bring prosperity to America — like was done in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration.
The GOP pledged to improve racial segregation by offering low cost loans to gated communities, exclusive golf resorts, and home-schoolers.
Triumphant GOP honchos guaranteed they will annihilate ISIS, totally eradicate diseases like Ebola and the dreaded GAY, and make Ted Cruz a household name. They pledged to intensify the national campaign to improve racial segregation by offering low-interest loans to gated-communities, private golf-resorts and home-schools.
And — in a bold election year tip-of-the-hat to Alaska, Wisconsin and Michigan — they swore to raise the temperature of planet Earth to a more comfortable setting by ignoring silly scientists who are always belly-aching about global warming.
GOP leaders agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
GOP paladins vowed to construct a half-mile wide oil-filled ignite-able moat (you know, the kind they dig around castles) to stop the huddledMexican masses yearning to breathe free from ever crossing the border into the United States again.
Last (but not least) they agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
Not Jesus.
Christian leaders praised today’s election results: it pleased Jesus, it really did, to learn that responsible, rich people with good values were finally going to fix things in America.
No more Muslim presidents, GOP preachers asserted confidently. Nor brown-skinned, another giggled.
