David Triguiero's Idaho

Welcome to David Trigueiro's Idaho

Welcome to my new blog!  I hope you enjoy it.  Please look around and make yourself at home.  I'd love your comments, opinions, and suggestions.  Please leave a comment or send an e-mail. 

I'm Back for Awhile

   Well, here I am back at the blog after something like a year doing other things like gardening, reading and, yes, watching television. Actually the television is something of a misnomer. I chopped off the cable years ago and the thing on the roof that receives the television waves and whose name I can’t spell fell down soon after. I ordered Netfix and watch PBS via my computer.

 There just didn’t seem much interesting to say about Idaho and no one seemed to be much interested. In any case I am far from a typical Idahoan. I was one once, but after the Vietnam War, escaping to Canada and living in what were to me big cities (one million and up) my conservative roots began to detach.

I wouldn’t call myself a liberal in the classic sense. I endorse a market economy, but not necessarily capitalism. I value individual freedom, but it must be measured in relationship to the entire community.

 Because I consider myself a Christian (Episcopalian) I know I must consider the whole world my community, but that is very hard to do. It is always tempting to blame the poor for their “less developed” situation because it’s our fault and we are ashamed. We exploited them for hundreds of years in order to develop ourselves and now we want them to develop themselves and buy our development stuff. 

Canada is very different from the United States; at least it was when I arrived there in late 1969. Like most Americans, however, it took me a long time to figure this out. For one thing, they are not “just like us.” Most of them speak the same language, but they don’t say the same things. They speak rather disfondly of America and Americans once you get to know them. None of them has any interest in being part of the United States.

Canadians are not all socialists although many do belong to and vote for the mildly socialist New Democratic Party (currently HM official opposition), which was founded by a Methodist minister and a Baptist layman. They are intensely practical as needs must when only 30 million are cast about the second largest country in the world.

When Canada Bell telephone refused to install their instruments in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta deeming it too expensive, the provincial governments set up their own companies.

 In the depths of the Great Depression a group of people in Swift Current, Saskatchewan began working out a way to ensure everyone received needed medical care. Their agreement with local doctors soon spread throughout the province and eventually the country creating the best health care system in the world.

Canadians proudly supported their military when it was engaged in two world wars. Conscription was finally forced on the government in the final year of both wars, but conscripts (called Zombies) were not sent overseas to fight. They openly resent American’s tendency to claim full credit for victory.

There is a lot to miss about Canada and I sometimes miss it a great deal. Nonetheless I feel at home here in Weiser and in the United States. The things that can make my fellow Americans so exasperating to deal with also make them the most open and accepting people in the world.

 

 

 

Digging for Fool's Gold

             

I am currently reading two books about war. One is a memoir called Guns of Normandy by retired Canadian Army Colonel George C. Blackburn about his days as a sub-lieutenant in charge of an artillery battery near Caen in the months following D-day in 1944. The other is Matterhorn, a novel written by Karl Marelantes, a highly decorated former U.S. Marine Corp. officer, about a company in the northern highlands of Vietnam in 1969.

            The similarities are striking. Each book reveals the horrors of combat with inspiring and heartbreaking reality. The Canadian soldiers and American marines fight for days on end, often without food or the time to eat it, and exhausted to near death by persistent dysentery and virtually no sleep. Their legs are covered with feces; there is no time or place for washing. Their uniforms are so frayed and tattered that they provide no warmth or protection from the elements.

They are commanded by Colonels and Generals located far behind the lines having whiskey highballs before dinner, eating steak washed down with imported wine and settling back with a fine liquor when full and finished. These men, of course, had put in their time at the front in one of the two World Wars or Korea and could not be called chicken. The Marine Lt. Colonel in Matterhorn, in fact, wants to be “in the bush” to personally “kick ass” and get his “grunts” moving.

What they are is self-absorbed and self-serving.  As the frustrated marine battalion commander tells the Lt. Colonel about his subordinate’s dedication to the corps: “…I’ll tell you Simpson. You think about where it’s going to get you. You use it. Either that or you let someone else use you so it’ll get them somewhere. I don’t know which is worse.”

This worries the ambitious aging Korean War vet, who desperately wants to command a battalion or, dare he hope, a division with stars on his shoulders before retirement. He is reassured by his slick young executive officer with no combat experience but lots of political moxie. “We’re top in the battalion on man-days per month actively in combat operations... Our kill ratio’s been climbing ever since I’ve come aboard…”

Body count, of course, was the only measure of success in Vietnam. Matterhorn nicely shows how this gets inflated as reports go up the line from squad to platoon to company to regiment to battalion to division to Washington.

 What never makes to Washington, or even division level, are marine casualty reports. How one man died of malaria and several more marines lost toes and legs to trench foot (the USMC calls it immersion foot) and jungle rot because Lt. Col. Simpson refused to send a medevac helicopter for “sissy” complaints.

One important advantage the Canadians and Allies had in France was a clear idea of what they were fighting for. The soldiers and marines in Vietnam had no idea why they were there, but fought as hard as their WWII counterparts nonetheless. “’Tell me something Lieutenant,’ said platoon machine-gunner Hippy (who would later lose his legs to immersion foot). ‘Just tell me where the gold is…something out there for us to be here. Just anything, then I’d understand it. Just some fucking gold so it all makes sense.’”

There was, of course, never any gold. Only Presidents Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s political ambitions and America’s collective delusion that it had never lost a war and wasn’t about to start now.

But was there any real “gold” at the end of WWII? Hitler lost, but Stalin won. Great Britain won, but lost its empire and was so broke its economy didn’t recover for 20 years. Japan lost and the U.S. took over world leadership, but at the cost of a 60-year arms race that it continued long after its chief rival had dropped out. President Ronald Regan’s one-country race ultimately beggared our economy.

Not satisfied, President George W. Bush started a mini-war in Afghanistan and then Vietnam redux in Iraq at a cost of trillions. Then President Barrack Obama switched emphasis to Afghanistan, making it the new Vietnam with nuclear-armed Pakistan waiting in the wings.

Now, we owe more than we can easily afford to repay. Unlike the good old days of the 50s, 60s and 70s this debt is owned not to Americans, but to foreigners, principally China, which also happens to be our current rival for world economic and military supremacy.

Did we win gold, or fool’s gold?

 

 

Down Goes the Bride

  

 

            Now that everybody can be in the movies, performance weddings are all the rage with some You Tube extravaganzas making it to the television evening news. But none are as entertaining as the weddings I saw in Weiser, Idaho when I was young and unobtrusive enough to accompany my father to his wedding gigs.

            My father had a lovely tenor voice and might have had a career in opera had World War II not prevented him from accepting a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music. As it was, he taught chorus and Spanish and Weiser High School, gave private piano, organ and singing lessons and performed at weddings and funerals.

            Bride singing was popular at the time and most were looking for alternatives to the standard warhorses like “Oh, Promise Me”. Two of his voice students, Vaunda and Ruth Young had a double wedding where they performed a coquettish duet of “I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me”.

            Bobbi Lee Travers, another student, earnestly sang “I’d Rather Have Jesus” before embarking down the aisle to marry Lance Lorigan. I remember searching faces in the Methodist church for any sign that someone else caught the irony.

            On rare occasions, the groom sang as well. When South Pacific was playing on every phonograph, a bride and groom sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to each other, alternating versus while she walked up the aisle, pausing every time it was her turn. So my father reported. I wasn’t there and don’t remember their names if I ever knew them.

            Concordia Lutheran Church was the setting for one of the nastier confrontations of my father’s long career. A rather large and acerbic young woman from out of town was marrying one of the Webb boys. Before the ceremony began she laid down the law: “I want you to really hit it when I come in, Mr. Trigueiro,” she ordered. Then her mother busily removed my father’s boutoniere explaining it was meant for the reader.

            Two dignified young boys in black slacks and white shirts rolled white butcher paper down the aisle and the wedding was set to begin. No one had informed my father that it was a candle-lit ceremony; as the organ was electric this proved a disastrous mistake. With the bride poised at the church door my father launched into a trumpet voluntary introduction to “Here Comes the Bride” only to have it collapse like a deflating balloon when an appointed usher turned off the main electrical switch.

            The bride fired my father a look that would freeze water. The lights were turned back on so everyone could get back into place and it started over. But the connection between the organ dying and the lights being turned off wasn’t made.

 This time, the bride and her father made it a quarter way down the aisle, her stiletto heels making a slight popping sound as they went through the butcher paper. As the organ dyed the bride wheeled around in a fury, caught a heel in the carpet and went down in a heap of satin and lace dragging her father with her.

The minister and my father finally persuaded the bride and her mother to leave the lights on, but the bride remains convinced that the catastrophic bridal marches were all my father’s fault. To this day, she drills Trigueiros with a dirty look whenever we encounter her around town.