A reminescence on dating General Curtis LeMay's daughter.

::::::::

NUKE THE CHINKS

John Bennett

Lines written before jumping out a ten-story window. While cowering in the belfry of Westminster Abbey. While building a stone wall to keep out the good neighbors. While contemplating nature from the vantage point of a gunship. Lines on the mirror, lines on her face. Beauty marks and age spots and the wild sun's corona. Lines in the dust, in the single's bar, strung out between a parabola of poles. The Wichita Lineman, splicing one voice to another over mountains and prairies, under deep troubled waters. Soup lines, unemployment lines, soldiers all in a row.

If you lined every Chinaman up six abreast and marched them into the sea, it would go on forever. That's what General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, in charge at the time of a fleet of perpetually airborne B-52s armed with atomic bombs, said to Arthur Godfrey on the Arthur Godfrey Radio Show. This alone was a good reason, said LeMay, to nuke the chinks.

All hell broke loose, and LeMay was told by the President to apologize. He never did. Instead he said that the woodpile was full of Communists who were putting words in his mouth. Nuke the woodpile.

When I was 13 years old I took General LeMay's daughter to a matinée on Offutt Air Base. It was a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis movie. We had to wait in line, and once inside the dark theater, she took my hand and placed it on her tiny breast. It was like Che Guevara dating Richard Nixon's daughter.

Not even General Curtis LeMay, sitting in his easy chair in his shirt sleeves sipping whiskey on ice in front of the TV when I picked up his daughter, could see what was coming.

Authors Bio:
Good lord. Who has time for this? I just ran down a great off-the-top profile up-date, hit "Save Profile Modifications", and got disconnected, because apparently I hadn't "logged in". Listen, "Booklist" once crowned me King of the Mimeo Revolution", that's how far back in time I go. I have a deep antipathy toward all this cyber space jive. But it's the only game left in town, so I do my best to hang on to the rudiments.

These days I'm known as King of the Shard. If you want to track that down, check out the Hcolom Press web page listed somewhere in this morass. I've been hard at it for a half century...

In June of 2006 I published a novel titled "Tire Grabbers" that picks up where "1984" leaves off; in keeping with what Orwell anticipated, it was totally ignored. To add insult to injury, shortly after the book came out my dog died, my lady left me, and a surgeon who spoke broken English sliced out my iliac arteries and replaced them with Dacron tubing that looks like something you can buy at a hardware store for 50 cents a yard. I'm on my feet again (or at least up on one knee waiting for the eight count), and just recently I completed another novel, "Children of the Sun & Earth" (my fourth) about a family of whiskey-running, drug-dealing, buccaneers dating back to the American Revolution who rub the U.S. intelligence community the wrong way. It's not half as prophetic nor profound as "Tire Grabbers" and so may have a snowball's chance in hell of getting published and possibly even noticed. Whatever. What dreams are left at the age of 70 are snow blind and missing a limb.

Just today I whipped out a poem in which I suggest to Barack Obama that he sit down and watch the 1949 film version of "All the Kings Men" and pick up a few pointers from Huey Long on how to connect with the rank-and-file. I doubt he'll see the poem, and even if he did, I doubt he'd take its advice, and most of you reading this already know how that American Idol election of modern-day Kafkaesque politics turned out. I'll try to slip it into the back pages of Op-Ed News anyway, just on the off chance.

And so it goes. Now I'm going to hit the dreaded Modify My Pofile button, and if this sucker disappears again, I'll chalk it up to a conspiracy theory...