A San Bernardino County train was under fire Monday night after bandits attempted a Wild West-style heist.A group of suspects fired on officers with the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) in what appeared to be an effort to rob the train as it passed through the desolate Cajon Pass between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains.
Americans have traditions too. Wild West train robberies are a valued part of our national heritage.
UPDATE: The only time I've seen Fiddler on the Roof was when my high school did it as its annual musical. I don't know why they picked it; we didn't have any Jewish students in the county as far as I know. I only went to see it because my sister played the mother, which in a way was family tradition too. She became a Thespian because my father had been one, although in fairness to him he only built sets. He didn't have a non-genuine bone in his body, so pretending to be somebody he was not wasn't a skill he ever developed.
11 comments:
I'm kinda surprised they needed to exchange gunfire with anybody. Virtual Railfan is full of videos of =containers passing their cameras after having been cracked open.
I connect with Fiddler on the Roof because it's about the arrival of modernity, which has hit us all.
noobs
I never even thought of it being about that. I thought it was about the universal themes of sustaining yourself in the world, never getting rich, the young wanting love, the older growing to accept that the love they found is not what they dreamed as youths but still pretty nice, and of course the exposure to violence from outside (which is true of modernity, but was true forever -- it was true when the Mongols came, or when the Turks did, as when the Cossaks did or the Tsars or the Reds or any number of others who have run over and destroyed existing civilizations).
Tradition! Apparently part of my maternal lineage involves a family tradition of being followed home by the neighbor's livestock. Along with rapid changes of address, sometimes across large bodies of water. I wonder if there is a connection? ;)
The respectable side of that family includes a Jewish ancestor who fled conscription. He was from the northern Rhineland, the northern edge of Alceis-Lorraine. He ended up in New Orleans, and may have done business with the ancestors of a branch of my paternal ancestry. Fiddler on the Roof always made me wonder what else drove him to the New World.
LittleRed1
...followed home by the neighbor's livestock.
The Scottish clan my mother's father's people came from had that tradition too.
I'm not saying it's not about all that. It just seems that the rise of Communism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism ending a centuries-old traditional life seems kinda like the coming of modernity to me.
I suppose Modernity got to rural Russia rather late compared to some other places.
Modernity is still unevenly distributed, I think.
At the beginning of WW I, the Russian empire, German empire, Austro-Hungarian empire, and Ottoman empire were all ruled by actual emperors holding real power, some more and some less, but power nonetheless.
And the Qing Dynasty almost made it there, only falling apart in 1912.
WW I was the death of that world for most, but it still lingered on in places. The last European feudal state, Sark, only became a democracy in 2008.
Islamists still work in the pre-national, pre-modern paradigm, I think.
I would say that modernity comes into the story in terms of the rapidity of change- prior to that time things changed considerably slower typically- or completely changed in conquest etc.
Well, completely and as rapidly. I doubt the Communists, bad as they were, had an effect any quicker or more complete than had the Mongols.
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