Golden Ball

the Golden Ball ketch under sail showing the starboard leeboard

My new employer, the Apalachicola Maritime Museum, is restoring an L. Francis Herreshoff design wooden boat, a shallow-draft, leeboard ketch designed for West Florida waters, named the Golden Ball. I have been working on a newsletter article celebrating the boat and chronicling the restoration process and progress. A Golden Ball fan stopped in Apalach for supplies and a look at the work in progress. I interviewed him about experience living aboard and sailing boats of this type.

During our talk, his wife, complained about all that welfare money going to drug addicts, how recipients should be drug-tested and denied benefits if positive. I was a bit astounded that a freewheeling, open sky, sailboat person could hold that view (I favor legalization and treatment and an absolute and complete end to the War On Drugs). We went on talking and my new friend turned out to be a War on Iraq and Vietnam War supporter. He actually said that if we had not overthrown Saddam Hussein in 2003 the Middle East would be in a terrible mess today (I wondered if he had skipped reading the news due to long time at sea and just had not noticed ISIS, the civil war in Syria, the disintegration of Libya, the militarization of Egypt. I also wondered if he had not noticed the cozy capitalism now practiced by the Vietnamese). He stated that the Vietnam War was only fought to stop Communism, as if Communism were a deadly virus. I objected, and we argued, then I apologized for my statements explaining that I mistakenly thought he was a working man, and a man of the people, not one of the rich elites that communism might harm. No, he said he had no money, but that he believed in Liberty and Choice, and he feared that some communist government would force him to do things he just did not want to do (maybe like work). He said he knew some Cubans who had told him how terrible their lives were before they fled Cuba for America. I replied that when a country is under constant, vicious attack from a powerful, terrorist neighbor, this kind of 'choice' must be abandoned in order to protect the nation from its enemies. He did not seem to understand my point, nor my thesis that communism in Vietnam was a homegrown response to French Colonialism, not a product of an international conspiracy where "the communists came to Vietnam from Russia (or China, he was not sure)." He also believed that Muslims in general were guilty of attacking 'the homeland', and that 9-11 was not just a criminal conspiracy (while the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing was). At this point in our talk, he actually threw up his hands and he walked out of the museum, so I guess I lost my friend! It is painful, sometimes, to be right.

I am confounded how these right-wing memes, so false and vile, are so prevalent in the culture and so impossible to dissuade. Neither logic nor facts work to bring forth right thinking in these kinds of peoples. On the other hand, some of our veterans might have committed or at least observed atrocities during their wars, and their sanity depends on a world view that maintains whatever the US does is always right, i.e. "My country, right or wrong." Very sad.