Hampers of Champers & *America's Great Debate*

When I got up this AM, sometime around 7, it was already 83 degrees.

Every other person you encounter is eating ice cream in some form and / or drinking something cold from a huge container. I noticed this yesterday on my way to therapy, which meant I was on the streets between 12:30 and 3:30 PM. It's that hot, that on a single block, I encountered 5 mango sellers -- they peel and carve up the mangoes right there -- if they're lucky they have a small umbrella over their improvised stand -- nope, not licensed vendors. Some of them have the skill to do so creatively and afix their fancifully sculpted mango upon a stick as well, rather than put the slices in a landfill choking plastic container. Naturally, there are the weather situational sellers of bottled water out of his or her cooler, right by the exit-entrance to the subway, on the shaded side of the street. I’m admiring these people who are determined to make a dollar however they can, no matter what the weather, and who use the weather to make a dollar.

And I'm on the bed, with icepacks, according to the back therapist's decreed 24 hour bed rest. Fortunately it is so hot that the ice packs are fine, and Bordewich, Fergus M. (2012) America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. Simon & Schuster, New York is so interesting, and I can pull over the laptop and take notes when notes need to be taken. Yes, I can make lemonade! Did you realize that in 1850, the governor of Mississippi, John Quitman, took off on a filibuster to invade and annex Cuba? The Cubans were guaranteed to meet their U.S. liberators with cheers and flowers as they brought the permanance of slavery in perpetuity to their island. As has happened almost always, however, when U.S. invading forces are expecting to be greeted with joy that they are bringing U.S. overlordship liberation, the ungrateful population shoots at them instead. They were forced to flee Spanish warships on their tail right into the bay of Pensacola, where obeying the reluctant orders of President Taylor, their fat was pulled from the fire of the Spanish warship. For which, naturally, President Taylor was roundly condemned by the likes of Senator Yulee (whose father made a fortune in Cuban sugar, and who would be Jefferson Davis's VP) "... for trampling first upon the Constitution, then on Cuba's desire for freedom -- and finally on what he considered the right of Americans to invade their neighbors whenever they wished."

This is the same era in which is set part I of the made-for-television Champagne Charlie (1989), starring Hugh Grant as Charles Heidsieck, who supposedly brought his family's champagne to the U.S. just prior to the Civil War. I don't know about that. But what none of the descriptions include is that he's prompted to do so by a burning passion for Megan Gallagher, er, the Southern Belle  something-or-other, a Louisiana slave plantation owner, I treat "my people" like family how dare you even think I am a bad person for owning slaves I'll shoot the first man who says I am and I'm damned good shot! and incidentally is a confederate spy before there is a Confederacy, and is a gunrunner with the additional mission to seduce the French gummit to declare itself for the Not Yet Seceded Confederate States of America. Naturally the southerners are so Good, so Chivalrous, so Charming, and they are Honorable like the French, unlike those money-grubbing Yankees, and they understand Champagne! Why, honee, I declah -- when Hugh Grant gets captured by the dirty Yankees outside of Richmond when he was innocently spying on behalf of his sweetheart for the CSA, while bringin' along hampers of champers, he and his fellow Confederate soldiers, who incidentally are all black men,  are put in a dirty Yankee prison, and the black confederate soldiers are viciously whipped by the dirty Yankee Federals for no reason except that they are rotten filthy bastards who like to treat our people with cruelty just for fun. Also, there is another plot, and another girl, played by an actress conveniently also named Megan, back in France, and, well, I don't know, but it just was goin' on and on and on, and I kept reading America's Great Debate instead. The take-away lesson here, is, once again, neither the English nor the French have real understanding about what the U.S. Civil War was, or what was at stake, or indeed, even that New Orleans and Richmond are very different cultures and a long way away from each other.*

So that was a bust -- back to netflix Champagne Charlie goes. My neighbor put it the mailbox this morning.
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* Unfairly maligning the Brits in this case (other than Hugh Grant); this was a French-Canadian television production.