Month: June 2017

By Jim Hagarty
2017

To the British politician who is advocating the death penalty for suicide bombers, you have my support. I hope no one is making fun of you for what they consider to a lame proposal, killing dead suicide bombers. I really do think you are onto something. Because suicide bombers are wily people. They make it look as though, following their bombing, their body parts are spread far and wide over the scene. That is exactly what they want you to think. In reality, they are like some chickens and turkeys that, after you chop off their heads, keep walking around for awhile without the assistance of brains. This analogy makes a lot of sense because one thing that is known is that a suicide bomber does not have a brain to begin with. That is a fact. A well-established one. He or she is walking around with a backpack over their shoulders but otherwise, headless and brainless. So the fact that, post bombing, the bomber’s arm is over there and his leg is on the other side of that car, while his head is who knows where, is no proof that he, in chicken-like fashion, is not able to strike again. In fact, the very absence of a brain in the first place is what seems to make the bomber the most dangerous. Imagine how much more lethal he would be if he is also missing numerous other body parts. He would be, logically, more difficult to detect if he is scattered all over a wide area. So yes, let’s find the bombers, scrape ’em up and toss ’em in a barrel and while traditional forms of death penalty executions might be a little hard to perform, might I suggest tossing a bomb into the barrel? Like the old commercials for a popular bug spray used to promise to do: Raid Kills Bug Dead! The secret and powerful message there was that it is not enough to kill suicide bombers; society needs to kill them dead. Sorry you live in England and I can’t vote for you. Good luck. Also, might I suggest, we burn down the bombers’ homes and when the fire is out, we reconstruct them and blow them up too? The Kill ‘Em Dead principle could be applied to lots of things. Brilliant.

Hank Williams Sr., left, and his grandson Hank III.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

Among all the pretty much useless facts I have accumulated over the years and never bothered to confirm because I am too lazy to do so is this one: We take our characteristics more from our grandparents than we do from our parents.

I don’t know whether or not this is scientifically true, but I do know that it seems to apply in my case. I never met my grandfathers but I think I share a lot of their characteristics. One was a writer and the other a musician, even though they farmed for a living. I consider myself both a writer and musician.

My Dad was neither of those things. However, he was a good farmer and businessman, something that might not have been true of his father, whose children thought of him as a dreamer. Dad’s business skills might have come from his grandfather who came from Ireland at the age of 18, cleared and farmed 150 acres, made a good living and retired when he was 55.

All of this is a long preamble to this: I am fascinated with Hank Williams and the other night I got hooked on a bunch of YouTube videos of his grandson Hank III performing. He is shown doing a couple of songs at the Grand Ole Opry and the resemblance to his Grampa both in appearance and sound is scary. Some people who attended the concert thought they were seeing a ghost.

Despite that, he is his own man – covered in tattoos and long hair – and he performs both country music and punk rock. The dozens of images of him on the Internet seem to portray him as a pretty wild guy. He and I would probably not have a lot in common and I can’t imagine a conversation between the two of us. But he does revere his Grandpa’s music and so do I so there would be that.