THE NETANYAHU EFFECT

Mona Lisa called and said, "I think the opposite of the Ben Franklin Effect is also true."

When I asked what she meant, she asked, "You know how some people act after you loan them money and then they don't pay it back and they get pissed off at the person who did them a favor?"

I answered, "We need to have a term for that effect;  Ben Franklin probably said something a propos, but we can't have TWO of the same effect;  I'll have to think of a term for it!"

Later, when I mentioned the conversation, Les said, "Yeah, you could call it the NETANYAHU EFFECT.  Bebe shows no gratitude to the President who made it possible for our country to supply BILLIONS in aid to Israel!"

HAPPY NEW YEAR

NEW YEAR'S EVE

Two things I don't do:

1. Go shopping the day after Thanksgiving.
2. Go out on New Year's Eve.

I always laugh and say, "There are AMATEURS out there!" suggesting that I am a PROFESSIONAL!

I used to be among the crazy people lined up at the Downtown Lazarus store to get whatever "Lazzie Bear" was being given that year. On December 3, 1979, the tragedy of eleven people being crushed to death at The Who concert in Cincinnati happened. The next year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I was in a crush of people at the air door at Lazarus, and a woman stumbled in front of me and I stumbled onto her back. Visions floated in my head of being crushed at that air door, like the people at the concert. I was able to keep from being injured and I turned around and left and have never again gone shopping on the day after Thanksgiving!

I don't drink and don't care to be around people who don't know how to drink. My usual New Year's Eve excitement includes: watching a movie; turn on the Times Square coverage at 11:45; kiss Gerald at 12:00; have a cup of eggnog with Les, listen to Dan Fogelberg's classic song Same Auld Lang Syne and then return to my movie.  Listen to Dan:

And you say there's no excitement in my life!

FAUTE DE MIEUX

A French phrase Faute de Mieux was included in Merriam Webster's "most looked up words" of 2016;  I wondered why it was causing such interest.

Faute de Mieux definition:  "for want of a better alternative";  AHA, yes, the presidential election!

WOUNDED KNEE

Please read this article from Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux, who is the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association and is also the publisher of the Native Sun News.

On clear nights when winter winds whistle through the canyons around Wounded Knee Creek, the Lakota elders say it is so cold that you can hear the twigs snapping in the frigid air. They called this time of the year "The Moon of the Popping Trees." It was on such a winter morning on Dec. 29, 1890, that the crack of a single rifle brought a day of infamy that still lives in the hearts and minds of the Lakota people.

After the rifle spoke, there was a pause, and then the rifles and Hotchkiss guns of the Seventh Cavalry opened up on the men, women and children camped at Wounded Knee. What followed was chaos and madness. The thirst for the blood of the Lakota took away all common sense from the soldiers.

The unarmed Lakota fought back with bare hands. The warriors shouted to their wives, their elders and their children, "run for cover" -- Iynkapo! Iyankapo!

Elderly men and women, unable to fight back, stood defiantly and sang their death songs before falling to the hail of bullets. The number of Lakota people murdered that day is still unknown. The mass grave at Wounded Knee holds the bodies of 150. Many other victims died from their wounds and from exposure over the next several days.

The Lakota people say that only 50 people out of the original 350 followers of Sitanka (Big Foot) survived the massacre.

Five days after the slaughter of the innocents, an editorial in the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer reflected the popular opinion of the wasicu (white people) of that day. It read, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

Ten years after he wrote that editorial calling for genocide against the Lakota people, L. Frank Baum wrote "The Wizard of Oz."

The federal government tried to erase the memory of Wounded Knee. The village that sprang up on the site of the massacre was named Brennan after a Bureau of Indian Affairs official. But the Lakota people never forgot. They still called it Wounded Knee. In the 1920s, Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve built the Wounded Knee Trading Post there to serve the Lakota people.

My father, Tim Giago Sr., worked as a clerk and butcher for the Gildersleeves in the 1930s, and we lived in one of the cabins at Wounded Knee that were later destroyed in the American Indian Movement occupation in 1973.

As a small boy, I recall summer evenings when the Lakota families sat outdoors and spoke in reverent voices about that terrible day in 1890.

Much of what they said was written down by a young man named Hoksila Waste (pronounced Hokesheela Washtay) or Good Boy. His Christian name was Sid Byrd, and he was a member of the Santee Sioux Tribe, a tribe that had been relocated and scattered around the state after the so-called Indian uprising in Minnesota.

Byrd wrote that it was the white man's fear of the spiritual revival going on amongst the Lakota in the form of the Ghost Dance that led to the assassination of Sitting Bull on Dec. 14, 1890, just two weeks before the massacre. Fearing further attacks, Sitanka (Big Foot), and his band, a group that performed the very last Ghost Dance, went on a five-day march in order to reach the protection of Chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency. The weary band was overtaken and captured at Wounded Knee Creek (Canke Opi Wahkpala).


Byrd believed, as do all Lakota people, that Big Foot died as a martyr for embracing the Ghost Dance "as freely as other men embraced their religion."

Byrd wrote in his Lakota version of what happened that day, "Later, some of the bodies would be found four to five miles from the scene of the slaughter. Soldiers would whoop as they spotted women and children fleeing into the woods and chase them on horseback. They made sport of it. I heard from the elders that the soldiers shouted 'Remember the Little Big Horn.'"

On the 100th anniversary of that infamous day, Birgil Kills Straight, Alex White Plume and Jim Garrett organized a ride that followed the exact trail taken by Big Foot and his band. That ride has taken place every year since Dec. 29, 1990. At the end of the ride they hold a ceremony called "wiping away the tears" that calls for peace and forgiveness. This year they will take that ride again, 120 years after the massacre.

Arvol Looking Horse, the Keeper of the Sacred Pipe of the Lakota, says a prayer every year on the hallowed grounds at Wounded Knee. He prays that America will someday apologize to the Lakota for the terrible deeds of the Seventh Cavalry, and that the 23 soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for the slaughter of the innocents, will have those medals revoked. He also prays for peace and unity.

Will America ever own up to its sins?

IN OMNIA PARATUS

In my article about Merriam Webster's choice of "Word Of The Year", I  was pleased to see a Latin phrase, In Omnia Paratus, but wondered about the "intense interest":

IN OMNIA PARATUS:  "ready for anything".

 
It seems the interest in the phrase is because of renewed interest in a series I loved: The Gilmore Girls, because there's a new series updating the lives of the characters.  In Omnia Paratus is the motto of "The Death Brigade", a secret society at Yale.  I fondly remember that episode;  see a clip below, or binge-watch the entire series on Netflix!