If anyone on planet Earth (or other planets) reads my blog, and they don't want to read about political parties, they may skim down, on this post, to where the dotted line is: under the dotted line is content about Mickey Mantle. Below the dotted line: a politics-free zone.
I thought of Grandma Snow (passed, 1982, I think) because of the Republicans. Was thinking, "This is not my Grandma Snow's GOP."
Trying to get hold of a thought, or concept: probably the best Leadership, Politics, Vision, whatever occurs when the person (a President or someone else) takes the position, or makes the statement, or takes the action which observers might have expected someone in the other political party to say, or take, or do.
Two examples:
1. President Eisenhower in his farewell speech, Janury 1961, warned us about the military industrial complex: he wanted people to be aware that "war is good for business" and that the Pentagon and the big corporations that make trillions from war-time expenditures can, together, get too much power. If that warning had come from a Democrat, particularly a further left-leaning one, it would have been taken somewhat differently. "Ike" (campaign buttons in the fifties read, "I like Ike" - !) had been president 8 years and before that, had an outstanding military career. So -- he could talk.
(You can get this on You Tube. Some of the shorter [1-2 minute] uploads of a segment of the speech are backed up with sort of annoying piano music which, I'm relatively sure, were not part of the original farewell address! If you keep trying different ones, you can get some without that piano.)
2. President Richard Nixon opening up relations with China. (1970-whatever it was.) As little as 10 years earlier, if a Democrat president had recommended talking with the Chinese leadership, some would have called him "red." Not nice, or accurate, but that's the way they would have played it. As a former red-baiter, ironically Nixon was somewhat uniquely positioned to Do The Right Thing. And he did.
When I was thinking about my party Friday, and feeling bad about the Republicans, I thought about it later --the thing is, it isn't that the original Grandma-Snow-type Republicans have become crazy, it's just that some Nuts have "attached" to our party.
But they haven't simply attached, they've, I'm afraid, sort of infiltrated, stomped over, and corrupted the way the party used to be. If Grandma Snow were living today, and she could see (and hear) the moronic antics of some of the politicians and the ever-redundant pundits, she would be horrified.
And I think they could all just hold their breath waiting for her to send them any money.
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Last week, reading the New York Times Review of Books, two stood out -- a biography of Mickey Mantle, and a collection of letters written by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I want the Moynihan book. After my book sells and I make enough money, 1st thing I'm gonna do is have some repairs on the Buick I'm driving, 2nd thing -- buy the Moynihan book.
The Mickey Mantle book, I'll probably never get read -- there's not enough time in life to read everything that looks interesting. But -- here's the part of the review I liked (and that's the good thing about the reviews, you DO have time to read those, and you learn a lot, even about the books you're not going to have time for.
___________ [quote] Mantle's 565-foot home run at Griffith Stadium in Washington in April 1953 was not merely one of the longest ever hit, nor was it just Mantle's true self-introduction on the baseball stage. It also sealed the sport's obsession with the "tape-measure homer," largely through the artifice of the anecdotal report by the Yankees' public relations director, Red Patterson, that he found the boy who had come upon the Mantle baseball where it finally stopped, in somebody's backyard. More than half a century later, Leavy [the author] tracked down the man, by then 69 years old, and managed to get just enough detail from him to produce a true picture of the transformational blast.
______________[end quote]
"The transformational blast."
The author asked an expert -- a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology / Medicine, Eric Kandel -- to try to explain both Mantle's explosive swing, which made the bat seem of double width, and his inability to explain to others how he did it.
Kandel answered: "I think your question is not dramatically different than asking, 'What makes Mozart Mozart?'"
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