Naked Swamp Run

Virginia Swamp, Matthew Brady photograph courtesy of the US National Archives

I left the Marine Corps in 1981. My dreams of making it a career had been shattered by the low morale and general malaise of that service in the years following the Vietnam war. Even worse, nobody would let us kill communists in an effective and organized fashion, and if you can't kill communists, what's the point of being a Marine?

Back home in Arkansas, things weren't so good. The economy was in the toilet, so jobs were scarce. Even the electronics training I had received in the Marines didn't help, because I had learned to repair equipment that was thirty years behind the state of the art. I eventually ended up living in a ratty trailer at the back edge of a swamp, one that looked a lot like the photograph above, scraping by on odd jobs and foraged food.

Still, scrounging acorns and hickory nuts was better than scrounging out of trash cans at a rest area. Trust me on this...

One cold, drizzly November afternoon, I was having some kind of identity crisis. Who exactly was I? I knew myself as the kid I had been a few years before. I knew myself as the Marine I had become. But I wasn't sure who I was that particular afternoon, and I had no clue who I wanted to be. The more I thought about it, the more important it became for me to answer the question until finally I couldn't take it any more.

Greg Abbott, the Anti-Conservative

Texas governor Greg Abbott has released a plan calling for nine Constitutional amendments. This plan highlights so much of what's wrong with what passes for conservatism in America today.

Abbott's Plan to Change the Constitution: Restoring the Rule of Law

Let's go over three of the problems that are killing American conservatism: the denial, the radical vision, and the hypocrisy.