feel the love

Interesting article about Verizon with their $2 fee idea --
they "ran it by" consumers,
then had to
-- RUN...!

Customer comments:
"We at Verizon take great care to listen to our customers." Yeah, right. Feel the love....

--------------------
What a bunch of greedy stupid idiots. And these people are running Veriozon?
With all the uemployed I would think it would be easy to find qualified replacements for these clowns.

--------------------
Amazing how good things happen when the Disaster-in-Chief is busy golfing in Hawaii and the worthless Congress has disbanded to the boonies.

The real people spoke and won.

Now, let's speak again in November and throw all the do-nothing's out!!!

----------------
These big corporations (such telecom, airlines etc) need to be broken up so that consumers get a better deal.

------------------------
Don't you remember that we did?
MA Bell spin- offs of all the Baby Bells?
Wall St. And big biz made billions and now, here we are again!

--------------------
It is a whole new game with social media. Ten years ago Verizon would have slipped this junk fee in without much notice until it was too late. Times have changed. Good job activists!

-----------------------
I love it. I remember the "fee to pay fee" in other contexts but I cannot recall now what it was. It is abhorrent.

------------------------
This is refreshing. Consumers can still effect change, and social media provides the weapon to do so.

[Comments from The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2011]

-30-

feet hit the ground

A 1942 film called Holiday Inn starred Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

The real Holiday Inn hotel chain was named after the movie title.
Irving Berlin wrote all of the songs for the film, including "White Christmas."

The movie has an atmosphere of determination, working hard cheerfully, accomplishing something, and a sly sort of black-and-white intimacy that makes the viewer identify with each of the characters -- all of them! -- not just one. It's as if you're right there, in the cozy, classically-textured living room at the inn.

Fred Astaire, dancing: the description I can come up with that does justice to his talent --





. [Hmm. I don't have enough skill to describe his talent.]
Here in the 21st Century we don't go looking for tap dancing on a regular basis, but a person watches Fred Astaire dance, it's like a "Come-to-Jesus" movement for Tap Dancing. (Why isn't everyone doing this?? -- ALL THE TIME - ?!!)

It is as if -- air and gravity and the every-day, work-a-day Rules of Existence don't apply to Fred Astaire -- he just skims, and flies, floats, spins, stomps, and then swirls with a shag-step that's so smooth it's almost invisible. It's like, "Wait-a-minute -- how'd he get over there?!"

And none of it is "special effects" or "blue screen" with a computer -- he did all the stuff, and the cameramen simply filmed him.

The Holiday Inn DVD contains extra things -- videos, histories, commentaries...there's film (from a different movie) of Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby performing together, singing and dancing: they both sing, and both dance, but the attitude, or received wisdom is that Fred is the better dancer, and Bing the stronger singer.

[Both:] In us you see a couple of song and dance men
[Bing:] I'm the song
[Fred:] I'm the dance
[Both:] For laughter, joy and happiness, we're advance men
[Bing:] With a song
[Fred:] And a dance

[Bing:] I sing for my supper
[Fred:] I dance for my lunch
[Bing:] I croon when the landlord comes around
[Both:] For miles around the women and children

{called out, Not sung} - pass! out! cold!

[Bing:] When my voice hits the air
[Fred:] And my feet hit the ground

[Bing:] Last night
[Fred:] Out in the moonlight
[Bing:] I came to serenade
[Fred:] A very pretty maid
[Bing:] I sang her to sleep with "Asleep in the Deep"

[Fred:] (That always makes them collapse!)

[Bing:] I saw her eyes close, then she started to doze
[Fred:] But she arose when I sounded taps
[Both:] Which goes to show what women will do when we're around
[Bing:] And my voice hits the air
[Fred:] And my feet hit the ground
------------------------------
In Holiday Inn, Crosby and Astaire play song-and-dance men working in New York. They have a problem of competing, in their social life, and "stealing girls" from each other. Their female dance partner in the act is Lila -- she's wearing Bing Crosby's ring but is about to run off with the Fred Astaire character.

Fred Astaire asks her, "What?! You didn't tell him yet?"
Lila: (deflated from not doing what she knows she has to do) -- "I couldn't. He gets a look."

"That isn't love. It's something to do with his -- liver...."

--------------------- When Bing Crosby starts falling in love with a new singing / dancing girl, Linda, he sings,

Sweetheart of mine, I've sent you a Valentine
Sweetheart of mine, it's more than a Valentine

Be careful, it's my heart
It's not my watch you're holding, it's my heart

It's not the note I sent you
That you quickly burned
It's not the book I lent you
That you never returned

Remember, it's my heart
The heart with which so willingly I part

It's yours to take, to keep or break
But please, before you start
Be careful, it's my heart

-------------------
...Bing Crosby's brainstorm after he loses Lila in New York is that he's been wanting to leave the city and have a quieter, more relaxed life. So he buys a farm in Connecticut.

"He's already bought the farm!" one of the characters explains. ...

-30-

avert; bewitch

Time.
Time to get accustomed to the idea (the reality) of 2012.
(I'm not even really used to it being the 2000s. Not necessarily on board with it. Feel like it should still be 19-something. ...)

Thinking about time, and coming across a reference to Proust, I remembered the title of his gigantic novel, "Remembrance of Things Past." Have not read it; always liked the title, somehow....

In his book, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting An Icon, author and Yale professor Wayne Koestenbaum wrote --
[excerpts]-----------Apparently Jackie was caught reading Proust at a campaign stop. In her last interview, she mentions Proust: "Proust? I'd read that long ago." In early coverage of Mrs. Kennedy, much was made of her recherché tastes in reading (everything from "Colette to Kerouac").
...
[from the first chapter]...I began to write about the allure of icon Jackie in May 1993, while the real Jacqueline Onassis was alive and well. I addressed my sentences toward her....But...Her cancer was announced; with sad suddenness, she died. I can't address Jacqueline Onassis anymore.

But icon Jackie remains, a baffling array of images still requiring interpretation --not because interpretation is a panacea for loss, but because Jackie darkly captivates, and captivation fumbles for a foothold in speech.

Dare I find words for why Jackie mesmerizes? Even while Jacqueline Onassis was alive, icon Jackie had a life of her own, obeying comic-book laws; we could no more explain the icon than we could avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time.
------------ [end excerpts] {copyright 1995. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York}

"Reverse time." Hmm.
Type in "time is" on Google and it offers us back --
time is on my side
time is running out
time is money
time is of the essence
time is an illusion

"avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time" --
man has a way with a phrase

-30-

(theory and practice...)

"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life."

-- Marcel Proust

----------------------------------------------
You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss...
a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply --
As time goes by.

[music and words by Herman Hupfeld]
{in the movie Casablanca}

-30-

we shall not fail

4 June 1940
(a speech given by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill):

“I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.

The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,

we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,

we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender,

and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

-30-

"Mercy Mile"

Christmas things:

singing Christmas carols in a group ("gang colors": red and green!) and it being so cold, too cold, glad to finish and have "lunch" (which was their odd & funny term for "a snack") in the church

the liberation of momentary inspiration and Cash to support it -- of buying Christmas gifts for family & friends, at Copley Plaza shopp. area to take home from college at Christmas break

the "hmmm"-moment of realizing presents taking up room in suitcase which was sort of needed for clothes...

after opening presents indoors by Tree, going out to garage for one final, large gift: a Sled. (Mobility!) sort of...

Christmas dinner, people seated all around a table, the Food plentiful, varietal, and delicious, and atmosphere of cheer, and hope, and goodwill -- when you don't really need to tell people anything, and they have no surprises for you, you can just "be," and the air between everyone can billow with comfort and pleasantness

Church -- the same story each year, always good, good to be comforted by the Expected

the "Bewitched" Christmas episodes -- when Samantha takes Larry and Darrin's cranky client to the North Pole, on her broom, to meet Santa Claus -- (make a believer outta that greedy Madison Avenue yo-yo...)

the Peanuts Christmas special! -- Hark the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king! Peace on earth, & mercy mild -- God and sinners -- reconciled!...rock on...

-30-

I WANT to pay taxes...

Thwarted in my desire to play the song "White Christmas" for some of my co-workers, I instead read about the song's author, Irving Berlin.

He was born in 1888 in Russia; his name originally was Israel Isidore Baline.

His family emigrated to New York City, leaving Russia because of the pogroms of czarist Russia -- (czar's guys would ride into the Jewish town and wreck & burn stuff.)

Irving Berlin grew up to write songs, including “There’s No Business like Show Business,” “God Bless America,” and many more as well as “White Christmas.”
The on-line encyclopedia (Wikipedia) says [quote]:

The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced "White Christmas", one of the most recorded songs in history. First sung in the film by Bing Crosby, it sold over 30 million records and stayed #1 on the pop and R&B charts for 10 weeks. Crosby's single was the best-selling single in any music category for more than fifty years. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia — a pure longing for roots, home and childhood…."

Richard Corliss also notes that the song was even more significant having been released soon after America entered World War II: [it] "connected with... GIs in their first winter away from home. To them it voiced the ache of separation and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth...." Poet Carl Sandburg said, "Way down under this latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace."

"White Christmas" won Berlin the Academy Award for Best Music in an Original Song, one of seven Oscar nominations he received during his career.

----------------------
Berlin supported the presidential candidacy of General Dwight Eisenhower, and his song "I Like Ike" featured prominently in the Eisenhower campaign. ... According to his [Irving Berlin's] daughter, "He was consumed by patriotism." He often said, "I owe all my success to my adopted country" and once rejected his lawyers' advice to invest in tax shelters, insisting, "I want to pay taxes. I love this country."

According to Saul Bornstein, Berlin's publishing company manager, "It was a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song, words and music, every day."

Berlin has said that he "does not believe in inspiration," and feels that although he may be gifted in certain areas, his "most successful compositions were the "result of work." In an interview in 1916, when he was 28, he said:
I do most of my work under pressure. When I have a song to write I go home at night, and after dinner about 8 I begin to work. Sometimes I keep at it till 4 or 5 in the morning. I do most of my writing at night, and although I have lived in the same apartment four years there has never been a complaint from any of my neighbors.... Each day I would attend rehearsals and at night write another song and bring it down the next day.

Not always certain about his own writing abilities, he once asked a songwriter friend, Mr. Herbert, whether he should study composition. "You have a natural gift for words and music," Mr. Herbert told him. "Learning theory might help you a little, but it could cramp your style." Berlin took his advice.

------------------- [end quote]

-30-

no room at the inn

I pulled in to Nazareth

Was feeling 'bout half past dead.

Just need to find a place

Where I can lay my head

Mister, can you tell me where

A man might find a bed...

He just grinned & shook my hand

"No" was all he said ...
-----------------------------

["The Weight"
The Band]

-30-

ghost of truth

Reviewing lyrics of The Band's song, "Ophelia," wondered --

"the ghost is clear"
??
!!
?
That's not even an expression!
I don't know why I rely on these lyrics posted on official Lyrics sites on internet: feel that it should be like Encyclopedia, sort of a Received Wisdom, but now think maybe should just listen to songs myself & type what I hear. And what makes sense.

...because -- it's got to be "the coast is clear."

"The coast is clear."
"The coast is clear!"
OK, that's an expression.
But how could a "ghost" be clear?
And -- hello? What ghost??
There was no ghost...!
makes no sense

this is the paradox of the internet:
we can look up Everything on "It"
and we may get true information
and we may get wrong information,
or incomplete information.

It's like, if it was wrong all the time, that would be better because at least it would be consistent -- you could look up the information, & then simply realize that the opposite is true. But it's inconsistent, that's the problem.
One of the problems.

Is it making our very lives less stable, because truth itself is called into question? Or sometimes disregarded?

-30-

darken my door

Boards on the window
Mail by the door
Why would anybody leave so
quickly for?
Ophelia...
Where have you gone?

The old neighborhood
just ain't the same
Nobody knows just what became
of Ophelia --
Tell me, what went wrong...

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Honey you know we broke the rules...
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know -- I'd die for you --

Ashes of laughter
The ghost is clear
Why do the best things always
disappear
Like Ophelia --
Please darken my door.

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Honey, you know we broke the rules--
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know, that I'd die for you...

They got your number
Scared and runnin'
But I'm still waitin' for the
second comin'
Of Ophelia

Come back home

-------------------------
["Ophelia," by Robbie Robertson. The Band.]

-30-

fresh as paint

When reading E.F. Benson's Lucia (and Miss Mapp) novels, sometimes you don't understand everything they're saying, partly because in England they say things differently than we do in America -- ("turn the subject" instead of "change the subject" and "coming round the corner" instead of "coming around the corner") -- & partly because they're written in the 1920s, and styles of expression in the language change & evolve over time.

Sometimes you read a paragraph and go, "That's so funny!" or "That's so true!" Other times you read a paragraph & think, "What?"
Sometimes it's like listening to music where you can't understand the lyrics. You can still like it, because of the rhythm, the beat, & the melody.

(I used to always think in "Edge of Seventeen" Stevie Nicks was singing, "Just like the one we love..." Come to find out, ("Behind the Music"...) she wasn't singing, "Just like the one we love," she was singing, "Just like the white-winged dove." whatever. ...)

Queen Lucia was published in 1920. It went out of print later. Then came back in the 70s. Nancy Mitford wrote a Foreword in 1971:

-------------------------------
At long last, here she is again, the splendid creature, the great, the wonderful, Lucia. What rejoicing there will be among the Luciaphils! Those of us who lost her chronicles during the war and have never, by Clique, by barrow or by theft, been able to replace them, now find ourselves armed against misfortune once again; when life becomes too much for us we shall be able to take refuge in the giardino segretto. The publishers, in reprinting QUEEN LUCIA (and by degrees, the whole saga), have deserved well of all who like to laugh.

Lucia (Mrs. Emmeline Lucas) is a forceful lady who lives in the South of England in two small country towns -- that is, when we meet her first, in the late Twenties, she is the Queen of Riseholme, but half way through her story (which ends just before the war) she transfers, presumably so that her creator can pit her against the formidable Miss Mapp, to Tilling. Tilling, I believe, is Rye, where E.F. Benson himself lived in the house formerly occupied by Henry James; this is the very house which Lucia finally worms out of Miss Mapp.

Lucia's neighbours in both towns are almost all, like herself, middle-aged people of comfortable means. Their occupations are housekeeping, at which most of them are skilled (there is a good deal about food in the books, and lobster a la Riseholme plays an important part), gardening, golf, bridge and bickering. None of them could be described as estimable, and they are certainly not very interesting, yet they are fascinated by each other and we are fascinated by them. [Makes me think of "Friends"...]

All this fascination is generated by Lucia; it is what happens with regard to her that counts; she is the centre and the driving force of her little world. As she is a profoundly irritating person, bossy, horribly energetic and pushing, [Monica Geller!] the others groan beneath her yoke and occasionally try to shake it off: but in their heart of hearts they know that it is she who keeps them going and that life without her would be drab indeed.

The art of these books lies in their simplicity. The jokes seem quite obvious and are often repeated: we can never have enough of them. [Like in "All In The Family" no matter how many times Archie said, "Editt, you are a dingbat," or, to his son-in-law, "Get away from me Meathead!" it was funny every time...you waited for it...] In Lucia in London, Daisy gets a ouija board and makes mystical contact with an Egyptian called Abfou. Now Abfou hardly ever says anything but "Lucia is a Snob," yet we hang on his lips and are thrilled every time Georgie says, "I am going to Daisy's, to weedj."

Georgie is the local bachelor who passes for Lucia's lover. Then there is the Italian with which Lucia and Georgie pepper their conversation: "Tacete un momento, Georgie. Le domestiche." It never, never palls. On at least two occasions an Italian turns up and then we learn that Lucia and Georgino mio don't really know the language at all; the second time is as funny as the first.

I must say I reopened these magic books after some thirty years with misgivings; I feared that they would have worn badly and seem dated. Not at all; they are as fresh as paint. The characters are real and therefore timeless; the surprising few differences between that pre-war world and its equivalent today only add to the interest. Money of course is one of them -- the characters speak of 2,000 pounds as we would of 20,000 pounds. At least two people have Rolls-Royces; everybody has domestiche. When listening-in begins, Lucia refuses to have a wireless until Olga, a prima donna whom she reveres, owns to having one and listens-in to Cortot on it.

None of them ever thinks of going abroad. When Lucia and Georgie want to get away from Riseholme for a little change they take houses at Tilling for the summer; that is what leads to them settling there.

But the chief difference is that, in Lucia words, "that horrid thing which Freud calls sex" is utterly ignored. No writer nowadays could allow Georgie to do his embroidery and dye his hair and wear his little cape and sit for hours chatting with Lucia or playing celestial Mozartino, without hinting at Boys in the background. Quaint Irene, in her fisherman's jersey and knickerbockers, would certainly share her house with another lesbian and this word would be used.

There are no children in the books -- "Children are so sticky," says Georgie, "specially after tea." After the death of Mr. Lucas both Georgie and Lucia are afraid that the other may wish for marriage; the idea gives them both the creeps. However, the years go by and they realize that nothing is farther from the inclination of either than any form of dalliance. Marriage is obviously the thing; Georgie remembers that he is a man and proposes it.

I was a fellow guest, at Highcliffe, with Mr. E.F. Benson soon after Lucia had become Mayor of Tilling. We talked of her for hours and he said, "What must she do now?" Alas, he died in the first year of the war; can we doubt that if he had lived Lucia would have become a General?
-----------------------[end Foreword]
Queen Lucia, by E.F. Benson. Copyright (the novel), 1920 by George H. Doran Company. Copyright (the Foreword), 1971 by Nancy Mitford.

-30-

-30-

spy unseen

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article about Facebook and how so many people are on it now, it's like those who are not "on it" are sort of like a -- minority.

Different points of view were commented in: riotously funny;
there are people who spend a LOT of time on Facebook and LOVE it and are REALLY REALLY into it.

And there are people who use it, and enjoy it, but don't spend that much time -- it's a smaller part of their lives.

And there are people who -- have a -- (what do you call it? a -- space??) on Facebook, but they're not into it, they're somewhat critical of the type of information that gets put up there by people, and they sometimes think about closing their account.

And there are the people in the minority: they "don't have" and are "not on" Facebook.

It's like this whole -- spectrum. Or -- no, continuum. I don't know.

One guy said he was closing his Facebook account; he'd determined it was a waste of time, and he listed the things he intended to do with the Time he saved by not being on Facebook: read; work out; create art; spend time with the cat.
: )
I was utterly charmed by that. Some guy in upstate New York.
"Spend time with the cat."

----------------------
I had been thinking about three great English novelists anyway, whose work has some similarities: you could almost group them together, maybe --
Jane Austen
Helen Fielding
E.F. Benson.

They write -- funny novels. (Or should say -- wrote -- two of them, dead.)

Put that thought together with the Facebook -- I don't know -- celebration / debate / heated argument...
and began imagining the characters in these authors' novels & whether (and to what extent) each would use Facebook.

Jane Austen's stories are written, early 1800s, and E.F. Benson's "Lucia" novels came out between the two world wars, so of course no Facebook existed in the "real" world of these fiction worlds. But even Helen Fielding's famous Bridget Jones character didn't have Facebook, it's so New; Bridget Jones seems so Modern, yet technology moves so fast, it makes even a character who burst on the scene in the late 90s seem like she exists in a "past" world...

Now, Bridget Jones would use Facebook; her (wonderful) boyfriend Mark Darcy would not be on Facebook. Her friends Jude and Shazzer would be on Facebook, and so would their gay friend Tom. Bridget Jones's mother ("Mum") would so totally be so all over Facebook she would actually use it too much, create too many accounts, meet and "friend" too many people, and cause too much commotion & eventually the Facebook corporation would ask Mrs. Jones to please close her account and go away. (LOL!) P.S., Bridget's dad would be relieved.

Jane Austen's Emma would be on Facebook, but would use it sparingly. She would consider it a little bit beneath her, & would say to herself that she would not allow time spent on the social network to at all interfere with her piano practicing and reading of good literature. Mr. Knightley would have no use for Facebook. Mrs. Weston would be on Facebook to keep up with her sister in London, and with Emma. Mr. Woodhouse would be utterly disapproving of the whole concept of the internet, forget Facebook. He would have concerns and fears that people might become too mesmerized staring at their computer screens. (And, quaint as his worrying always is, he would not be entirely wrong in his conjectures.)

Miss Austen's "Elizabeth Bennet" in Pride And Prejudice would not disapprove of Facebook, & would consider opening an account, but would not have got around to it yet. Mr. Darcy most emphatically would not be on Facebook. Elizabeth Bennet's father would think Facebook was all right, but would not participate. Mrs. Bennet would be on it.

E.F. Benson's "Lucia" would resist the idea of Facebook, and would worry about whether members of her social circle were on it. Once she knew that some of them were on Facebook, she would want to look and see what they put up there, but she would not want anyone to know that she looked. Miss Mapp would search all over Facebook looking to see what the other people in the town put up there, and looking for something about anyone that she can interpet as bad. Georgie Pillson would be on Facebook, happily and humbly "friending" people.

--------------------------------
--------------[excerpt, Miss Mapp]: Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older. Her face was of high vivid color and corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body....Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

She sat, on this hot July morning, like a large bird of prey at the very convenient window of her garden room....This garden room, solid and spacious, was built at right angles to the front of her house, and looked straight down the very interesting street which debouched at its lower end into the High Street of Tilling....from a side window of the garden room...she could sit quite close to that, for it was screened by the large-leaved branches of a fig tree and she could spy unseen.

...There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp's eyrie. Just below her house on the left stood Major Flint's residence, of Georgian red brick like her own, and opposite was that of Captain Puffin. They were both bachelors, though Major Flint was generally supposed to have been the hero of some amazingly amorous adventures in early life, and always turned the subject with great abruptness when anything connected with duelling was mentioned....

...And only last week, being plucked from slumber by some unaccountable indigestion (for which she blamed a small green apple), she had seen at no less than twelve thirty in the morning the lights in Captain Puffin's sitting room still shining through the blind. This had excited her so much that at risk of toppling into the street, she had craned her neck from her window, and observed a similar illumination at the house of Major Flint. They were not together then, for in that case any prudent householder (and God knew that they both of them scraped and saved enough, or, if He didn't know, Miss Mapp did) would have quenched his own lights, if he were talking to his friend in his friend's house.

The next night, the pangs of indigestion having completely vanished, she set her alarm clock at the same timeless hour, and had observed exactly the same phenomenon. Such late hours, of course, amply accounted for these late breakfasts; but why, so Miss Mapp pithily asked herself, why these late hours?

...Miss Mapp had a mind that was incapable of believing the improbable....

[end Excerpt]
-------------------------------------------
{Miss Mapp, by E.F. Benson, Copyright
1922. George H. Doran Company.}

-30-

dulled, pummeled, and badgered -- oh my

A guy named Carne Ross wrote in the Huffington Post the following:

----------------------- [quote from article] -- [The last line is the most important]: The political methods of the 20th century are, it appears, less and less effective for the world of the 21st.

The nature of globalization is without precedent: accelerating interconnectedness, with billions of people interacting constantly in a massive, dynamic, and barely comprehensible process.

Yet the assumption persists that the political processes and institutions designed in the 20th century, or earlier, remain appropriate and effective in this profoundly different state of affairs. In fact it appears that the ability of national governments and international authorities to manage the severe problems arising from this new dispensation are declining, despite their claims to the contrary.

...Effects in the real world should be the test...
Experts say that the internationally-agreed Basel III rules to reduce risky banking practice are insufficient, and they are already being watered down by banks’ lobbying. …

At home, democracy has been subverted. Corporations donate copiously to both parties to insure their influence. Politicians initiate legislation in order to extract rents from big business. Private prison owners lobby for longer sentences. There are now lobbying organizations representing the interests of lobbyists.

There is a more pernicious consequence of the repetitive but tenuous claims to effectiveness made by the practitioners of conventional politics and government: everyone else is dulled into stupefied inaction. If “the authorities” claim to be on top of these problems, what does it matter what we do? …
We have been pummeled into a kind of dazed apathy, endlessly badgered by politicians that they can fix it, when in fact we are the most potent agents of change.----------------------- [end excerpt, Huffington Post, Dec. 12, 2011]

And -- the last line is the most important.

-------------------------------------
He followed that up with an article telling the reader how he can be a "potent agent of change" -- a list of nine or ten things, and Voting was not even in the list.

There goes my whole world view...
(More music -- fudge -- eeehhgh...)

-30-

if you try sometimes

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes well -
you just might find ...

You get what you need
Oh -- yeah...

Mick! Keith! What do those lyrics mean? I'm going to have to take them to mean --
that since cannot find anything under 700 !(*%^#^#@! dollars to
TYPE
and
PRINT STUFF OUT
on
-- even Manual Typewriters -- anything that's gonna work is 700$$ & less expensive ones aren't real --

I'm gonna take the "you can't always get what you want" lyrics to mean:
I have to keep writing, pen and paper longhand, and
FORGET about ever having anything at home to type stuff and print it out on.
I am so tired.
Of.
This.

A person can write out their book in long-hand and send it to an agent, but -- by today's standards, they're not going to look at it, everybody expects everyone to be able to afford a computer in every room. They aren't going to accept the fact that a lot of people can't afford a computer --or even a typewriter -- & don't have a way to get their story typed. They're never going to understand that or give a rat's ass & will never read what I send them.

(Of course they don't look at the typed ones either, so --.)

You can only get published if your work is shown to the publisher by an agent and you can only ever get an agent if you're already published, prosperous, and famous, one of those doomed, round-in-a-circle, chicken-egg Things.

I wish I had never seen the free computer, it only made me realize how hopeless my goals are.

--------------------------
On bright side -- some guys I work with got the free computer -- (they don't need to print!), they are happy, and -- I made fudge.

-30-

"extreme" typing

OMG
(oh my goodness)
Did not realize how very much I
desire
a
Manual Typewriter
until discovered how incredibly difficult / impossible / Aaaauuugggghhhh!
it is to match a printer to what Computerhumans call

"an outdated operating system."
(Yuh--from last spring...(!!!) sorry for doing such a Silly Thing as trying to get printer for computer from -- like -- last weekend...[!]
ok it's older than that but come on...!!!!)

Local store person assures me I can get an XP tower and a printer that will "communicate with" it for a amount which is -- more money than the whole shebang costs at Walmart --
the precise amount of money which is Too Much...erk, mmrrmphgughqx @#%%#@!

-----------------
may go another route: I learned to type -- (touch system, no looking at keys) ON a "Manual Typewriter" so long ago freaking Nixon was president (wage and price controls) --
did it then, can do it now dammit
-- and they (the manual typewriters) are -- floating out there -- on the internet ocean -- in space -- near the Sea of Tranquility --
at prices from $10 to $650.

($25 - $85)...
N-n-n-n-n-0-0-0-0-w-w
we are
talkin'

Am tired of all this -- everything's-outdated-so-fast-to-keep-you-buying new
and thus-churning-money-through-economy-which-benefits-someone-somewhere-but-not-me-far-as-I-can-tell:

By going with a Manual Typewriter,
am-taking-stand-against-being-forced-coerced-to-buy-stuff-cannot-afford,
and
(I'm guessing)
helping the Environment, in some way -- would like to believe. ...Hmmm...

The Smith Corona Classic 12!
The Vintage Royal Aristocrat...
The Smith Corona Sterling...!
The Smith Corona Super Sterling...
Yum.

Do not possess internet at home.
Wish to do "production typing."
Think circumstances have led (or pushed?) me to correct decision...
OMG, am psyched.

-30-

Amen

"May the authorities grow like onions with their heads in the ground!" is an off-the-cuff curse tossed out by an Anatevka villager in Fiddler On The Roof.

The men stand in a group, around a wagon, talking. The news-bringing guy comes over with a long sheet -- "In a village called [something-or-other] all the Jews were forced to leave."

They stand in intimidated stressful awe.
"For what reason?"
"Doesn't say. Maybe the tsar wanted the land. Maybe a plague."

"May the tsar have his own personal plague!" one cries.
All together: "Amen!" And they all turn away and spit.

More discussion.
News guy: "I don't know any more than that. An edict from the authorities."

"May the authorities grow like onions, with their heads in the ground!"

"AMEN!"
Spit.

------------------------------
F-O-T-Roof
takes place during the last gasp of tsarist Russia right before the communist revolution (1917...?)...
talk about out of frying pan & into fire...
Tsarist Russia was a lousy place to live for many of the people -- that's why they got the energy for a revolution -- then the communists were just as bad or worse...
when I was in elementary school my piano teacher told me that Russian music is often in a minor key because "the people over there haven't had very much to be happy about."

---------------------------
I was thinking about the scene with these grown-up, hard-working, devoutly religious villagers -- cursing the "authorities" - ! (I was taught, "The policeman is your friend.") ...but in a society, and system, where the actual authorities misbehave and persecute, and it's the authorities you have to be afraid of more than actual criminals -- that's a whole dysfunctional & corrupt system.

Traditionally we think we're safe from that type of scenario in America, because we live in a democracy and the authorities are the "good guys."

-30-

facets of publicity

One evening a few weeks ago I discovered -- stumbled upon, completely by accident -- an article in a trade journal about the company where I work.

("This article stars us! Wow, Yay!")

Not like being in The New York Times or national magazine or something, but it's still -- An Article About Us!

So I was showing the article to people who work here -- one man sat down and read the entire article carefully. When he finished he said, with skeptical smile and some gentle doubt in his voice, "Well -- they make it all -- sound -- very -- Good..."

Another man, as I held out the magazine open to the article-about-us page, glanced at the full-page photo of a corporate executive & walked away: "rh-rh-rhrhrhnahru-read-about-him...he doesn't even know who-I-am...!"

A third worker responded to that, later, with a judiciously enunciated, thoughtfully spoken sentence: "I've always found, that if the -- top guy -- doesn't know you, ... that's a good thing."

Some of the people we work with speak only a small amount of English -- when I showed the magazine article to people, those who had the least understanding of what it was, seemed to be the most impressed ...

-------------------------
Standing in my office with my "find" -- the exciting, interesting, surprising magazine article, I had not predicted any of those reactions. ...

-30-

...when unchecked

"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-- WINSTON CHURCHILL, speech, Nov. 11, 1947

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
-- ROBERT HUTCHINS

"Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers."
-- ARISTOTLE

"Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike."

-- PLATO

God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing toward democracy, and saying to the nations of the earth, "This is the way: walk ye in it."
-- HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

"Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy."
-- BILL MOYERS, The Nation, Jan. 22, 2007

"The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
-- SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004

"There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship."
-- RALPH NADER

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet."

-- ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, May 19, 1856

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."

-- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."

-- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty."

-- JOHN ADAMS, letter to John Taylor, 1814

-30-

a proper blessing

Rabbi, may I ask you a question?

Certainly, Leibesh.

Is there a proper blessing...for the Tzar?

A blessing for the Tzar?
Of course.
May God bless and keep the Tzar --
far -- away - from us!



[Fiddler On The Roof]

-30-

work to live, or live to work?

[excerpt, Rybczynski]---------------------
What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford or Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of a materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

Or is this the heralded Leisure Society? If so, it is hardly what was anticipated. The decades leading up to the 1930s saw a continuing reduction in the number of hours in the workweek -- from sixty to fifty to thirty-five. There was every reason to think that this trend would continue and workdays would grow shorter and shorter. This, and massive automation, would lead to what was then starting to be referred to as "universal leisure."

Not everyone agreed that this would be a good thing; there was much speculation about what people would do with their new-found freedom, and some psychologists worried that universal leisure would really mean universal boredom. Hardly, argued the optimists; it would provide opportunities for self-improvement, adult education, and a blossoming of the creative arts. Others were less sanguine about the prospects for creative ease in a society that had effectively glorified labor, and argued that Americans lacked the sophistication and inner resources to deal with a life without work.

...
All this has called into question the traditional relationship between leisure and work, a relationship about which our culture has always been ambivalent. ...The Aristotelian view that the goal of life is happiness, and that leisure, as distinguished from amusement and recreation, is the state necessary for its achievement.

"It is commonly believed that happiness depends on leisure," Aristotle wrote in his Ethics, "because we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace." ...

Opposed to this is the more modern (so-called Protestant) work ethic that values labor for its own sake, and sees its reduction -- or, worse, its elimination -- as an unthinkable degradation of human life.

"There is no substitute for work except other serious work," wrote Lewis Mumford, who considered that meaningful work was the highest form of human activity and who once went so far as to liken the abolition of work to a malignant Final Solution.

According to this view, work should be its own reward, whether it is factory work, housework, or a workout. Leisure, equated with idleness, is suspect; leisure without toil, or disconnected from it, is altogether sinister. The weekend is not free time but break time -- an intermission.
------------------- [end excerpt]

{Waiting for the Weekend, by Witold Rybczynski.
Copyright 1991. Penguin Books, New York.}

-30-

'Twas in another lifetime

A crashing, rolling, frightening Thunderstorm happened the night of the Fourth of July the year I was 10 or 11 years old. A fireworks display at the Hudson Plaza in Ohio -- you would, like, sit in your car in this big shopping mall parking lot & watch the fireworks.

(I suppose everyone would have sat on their cars, or on the grass if it hadn't been storming.)

Or -- how was it? Did the storm come later, as the fireworks ended & everyone headed for home? Or did those northeastern Ohio patriots set off big professional-size fireworks right during a Thunderstorm? Not sure...

But for some reason I could never forget the excitement / danger of the evening: going to see fireworks! - excitement!
A ferocious thunder-and-lightning Rainstorm! - danger!

It was an intense, stormy, loud, dark, lightning-flashed, sloshy slashy wet drive home.

And the next day I woke up to find out that the largest tree in the backyard had been hit by lightning and was now horizontal instead of vertical. You could actually do more things with the tree in that position. A while later it got moved out of there, but temporarily the tree was more fun than when it was upright -- you could climb it better, & the branches with their outer tips touching the ground, made a space that was clubhouse-like. Or maybe a -- "fort."

Having the tree down seemed exciting and new, and strange -- and fun.
How unexpected!
How fascinating!
Let's go!

And on that same summer morning I learned that a young woman from our church was killed the night before in the storm. She and her boyfriend were driving and there was a tree down across the road and they didn't see it until too late and crashed into it. They were both killed.

I didn't know her personally; only knew her face from church, and her name, Karen (something) was familiar, at the time.
She had a mother and a grandmother who came to church also. There didn't seem to be any man -- any father -- around, just mother and grandmother, and Karen. She had dark brunette hair and pale, light skin. (When a person who sells make-up / skin-care "does your colors" they call that type a "winter" ...)

The death was shocking news. Someone else's tragedy, but nearby. Caused by the same thunderstorm we had driven home in.

And I remember my father, who was the minister, returning home, that day or maybe another day, from visiting Karen's mother and grandmother -- the standard (I imagine) consoling, being there for the people, pray if they want it...
and when he got home he was unloading to my mother -- he was concerned / aggravated because he had the impression that the mother and grandmother -- this unprotected family of women -- were leaning toward buying (selecting?) funeral (what's the word, "accessories"? "products"?) that were more expensive than what they could sensibly afford.

Like -- the most expensive coffin, or whatever.
A person would be sort of -- expressing their grief, and acting out their shock, by -- spending a lot, by Getting The Best -- "Nothing's too good for Karen!" ...

I think he felt like the funeral person -- funeral director? undertaker? -- was -- either steering, guiding, these bereaved & shocked women toward spending more money than they could really afford, for profit's sake, OR -- at any rate, not steering them -- failing to guide them toward a sensible, realistic decision.
Fine line, maybe.

Maybe it's good for people to spend a lot and let part of the Grief Pressure out, that way.
But I think my father felt like, "Sure, now you're bereaved and shocked; by this time next week you're gonna be bereaved & shocked & broke." He didn't want to see that, and yet there was probably nothing he could properly say.
(Can hardly come out with, "Hey ladies! This dude be rippin' you off...!")

-----------------
The sun was very bright, the morning after that storm.

-30-

seat by the Eastern wall

"Well! I think that's been absolutely smashing!"
said Bridget Jones's mother (mum) in a passage from The Edge Of Reason, sequel to the Diary.

"Absolutely smashing" would be a fun phrase to integrate into our American way to speaking but we don't...some things are just -- British.

"petrol" for gas
"mobile" for cell phone
"lift" for elevator
etc. etc.
It's the same language, and yet different...

Smashing.
smashing
"Absolutely smashing!"
"Absolute smashing...!"

I don't think it's a sell.
I like it when they say it, though.

-------------------------------------
I think, sometimes, about the difference between a day when you go to work and a day when you don't.
The thing is imperative.
When you have to be at work -- get to work -- it's an imperative. A thing you have to do, by a certain time. It's a push. An imperative.

When you like your job and the people you work with, and it gets to be Friday and you are HAPPY that it's about to be the Weekend, and you ask yourself, "Why am I happy to not come back here for two days? I LIKE to work here. I don't not-like to come to work, so why is the weekend then such a Joy?..."

Because humans need some days -- hours, time, when there is no imperative.
No place you have to be.
No thing you have to do.

We need a break from Doing Things, so that we can come back and Do Things again.

There's a wonderful book titled Waiting For The Weekend, which tells some history of how weekends and holidays got started in the world. You study back about the ancient times, and it was -- every 4th to 8th day, being set aside for market or rest, or both.

Religions and governments would give edicts, dictates, policy, (scrolls and the like) to say, "On this day, you will do no work." But really, it was mostly the religious and government guys observing what people naturally did anyway, and then making it their own policy -- sort of -- putting oneself More In Charge by -- "A-hem!" mandating --
stuff people were --
Already Doing.

Legislating common sense, one might say.
Or -- taking credit for a great idea by putting in writing what was happening anyway.

And the things we look forward to Doing in our free time!
Sometimes the planning and dreaming can be more fun (and possible) than the actual doing, even when the weekend does arrive. Recently I noticed the same idea in two different films -- in both Fiddler On The Roof, and My Fair Lady, a character imagines if they had financial security and (thus) leisure, one of the things they would do is -- spend more time on Religion.

I thought that was interesting.
In My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle sings,
"One day I'll be famous, I'll be proper and prim
Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim..."

and in Fiddler-Roof, Tevye sings,
"If I were rich I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men,
several hours every day.
And that would be the sweetest thing of all."

-----------------------
There's leisure, and --
the Imagining of Leisure.

-30-

hold on

In recent months I was re-experiencing and -enjoying "If," the poem by Rudyard Kipling, then, recent weeks, I read some in Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, by Helen Fielding and found that Kipling poem, bobbing up in a wild, typically Jonesian scene.

----------------------
[Bridget's on phone with her gay friend Tom -- Tom wants Bridget's mother's phone #]:
"What do you want it for?" I said suspiciously.
"Isn't she in a book club?"
"Dunno. Anything's possible. Why?"
"Jerome's sensing his poems are ready, so I'm finding him book club venues. He did one last week in Stoke Newington and it was awesome."
"Awesome?"...

"What is it about book clubs?" I said when I'd put the phone down. "Is it just me, or have they suddenly sprung up from nowhere? Should we be in one or do you have to be Smug Married?"
"You have to be Smug Married," said Shaz definitively.
...

"Oh, hello, darling. Guess what?" My mother. "Your friend Tom -- you know the 'homo' -- well, he's bringing a poet to read at the Lifeboat Book Club! He's going to read us romantic poems. Like Lord Byron! Isn't that fun?"
"Er...yes?" I floundered.
"Actually, it's nothing special," she sniffed airily. "We often have visiting authors."
"Really? Like who?"
"Oh, lots of them, darling. Penny's very good friends with Salman Rushdie. Anyway, you will be coming, darling, won't you?"

"When is it?"
"A week on Friday. Una and I are doing vol-au-vents hot with Chunky Chicken."
A sudden fear convulsed me. "Are Admiral and Elaine Darcy coming?"
"Durr! No boys allowed, silly. Elaine's coming but the chaps are turning up later."
"But Tom and Jerome are coming."
"Oh, they're not boys, darling."

"Are you sure Jerome's poems will be the sort of thing that..."
"Bridget. I don't know what you're trying to say. We weren't born yesterday, you know. And the whole point about literature is free expression. Ooh, and I think Mark's coming along later. He's up doing Malcolm's will with him -- you never know!"

-------------------- [and on the Night-Of]:
Was greeted by Mum, wearing a very strange maroon velvet kaftan which presume she intended to be literary.
"How's Salman?" I said as she tut-tutted about my lateness.
"Oh, we decided to do chicken instead," she said sniffily, leading me through the ripply-glassed French doors, into the lounge where the first thing I noticed was a garish new "family crest" above the fake stone fireplace saying "Hakuna Matata."

"Shh," said Una, holding a finger up, enraptured.
Pretentious Jerome, pierced nipple clearly visible through black wet-look vest, was standing in front of the cut-glass dish collection, bellowing belligerently: "I watch his hard, bony, horny...{some of my own deletions here}...I grab," --

at a semicircle of appalled Jaeger-be-two-pieced Lifeboat Luncheon Book Club ladies on reproduction Regency dining chairs. Across the room I saw Mark Darcy's mum, Elaine, sporting an expression of suppressed amusement.

"I want," Jerome bellowed on. "I seize his...{can't type it inthisblogtryingtobeopenminded}..
"Well! I think that's been absolutely smashing!" said Mum, jumping to her feet. "Does anyone fancy a vol-au-vent?"
Is amazing the way the world of middle-class ladies manages to smooth everything into its own, turning all the chaos and complication of the world into a lovely secure mummy stream, rather as lavatory cleaner turns everything in the toilet pink.

"Oh, I love the spoken and written word! It makes me feel so free!" Una was gushing to Elaine as Penny Husbands-Bosworth and Mavis Enderbury fussed over Pretentious Jerome as if he were T.S. Eliot.
"But I hadn't finished," whined Jerome. ...
Just then there was a roar.

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you." It was Dad, and Admiral Darcy. Both paralytic. Oh God. Every time I see Dad these days, he seems to be completely pissed, in bizarre father-daughter role-reversal scenario.

"If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you," Admiral Darcy bellowed, leaping on to a chair to a flutter from the assembled ladies.
"And make allowance for their doubting too," added Dad, almost tearfully, leaning against the admiral for support.

The pissed duo proceeded to recite the whole of Rudyard Kipling's "If" in manner of Sir Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud to the fury of Mum and Pretentious Jerome who started throwing simultaneous hissy fits.
"It's typical, typical, typical," hissed Mum as Admiral Darcy, on his knees, beating his breast, intoned, "Or being lied about, don't deal in lies."
"It's regressive, colonialist doggerel," hissed Jerome.
"If you can force your heart, and nerve and sinew."
"I mean it fucking rhymes," rehissed Jerome.

"Jerome, I will not have that word in my house," also rehissed Mum.
"To serve their turn long after they are gone," said Dad, then flung himself on the swirly carpet in mock death.
"Well, why did you invite me then?" hissed Jerome really hissily.
"And so keep on, when there is nothing in you," roared the admiral.
"Except your nerve," growled Dad from the carpet. "Which says to you" -- he leapt to his knees and raised his arms -- "hold on!"

There was a huge cheer and round of applause from the ladies as Jerome flounced out slamming the door and Tom rushed after him. I looked despairingly back at the room straight into the eyes of Mark Darcy.
"Well! That was interesting!" said Elaine Darcy, coming to stand by me as I bent my head, trying to recover my composure. "Poetry uniting the old and young."
"The pissed and sober," I added.
At this Admiral Darcy lurched over, clutching his poem.
-------------------------------------
Excerpt from Bridget Jones: The Edge Of
Reason, by Helen Fielding. Copy-
right, 1999. Penguin Group, New York.

-30-

10 to 20 more years

[excerpts from The Agenda]
"If you let 10 to 20 more years go on where the middle class keeps losing ground,...this won't be the America any of us grew up in."
--Bill Clinton. May, 1991

The Soviet threat was evaporating, and foreign policy would not play a big role in the campaign, he predicted. Instead, the economy would be the decisive issue. America's economic system was out of whack -- great for the wealthiest 20 percent, who were getting richer, but lousy for the other 80 percent, who were sinking or treading water. The working- and middle-class alienation could help him win in 1992. These groups constituted the vast majority of voters, and they felt insecure.

...Hillary Clinton watched the forces and ideas at work on her husband. ...He was indignant about what the Republican policies had done to the average person -- little or no wage increases, job insecurity, the fraying of the safety net. As governor, he had paid the price. He had told his wife once with some bitterness, "It would be great to be the president like Reagan, who cuts taxes so that every governor, including Republicans, had to raise them."

During a trip to Japan several years earlier, Hillary Clinton had overheard a conversation between her husband and a Japanese executive. "You could do a lot to stimulate your economy," the executive told Clinton, "if your executives in American industry weren't so greedy." Her husband replied that American executives were being given permission to grab the most at the top by the Reagan economic policies, which were designed so wealth would allegedly trickle down....

Professor Stanley B. Greenberg was devoted to studying the crisis in the Democratic Party and the defection of middle-class and working-class whites -- the so-called Reagan Democrats -- to Republican presidential candidates in the 1980s. These voters held the balance in national elections, and Greenberg argued that they wanted to return to their party, to come home. Party leaders had to reach out to this disaffected and forgotten middle class, which saw itself squeezed -- paying for programs for the poor and tax breaks for the wealthy, while getting little in return from government. The middle-class crisis presented an opportunity for the Democrats. Buried in the article, Greenberg also invoked the magic phrase "tax relief."

Later, when he asked Clinton for his reaction, the governor replied, "I've read it three times."

Clinton told Carville and Begala...that he was personally shy of a populist label. Populism seemed to him too anti-government and anti-business. He wanted to chart a course without reference to old labels. ...
----------- Begala had studied the strategies of Republican operative Lee Atwater and agreed with Atwater's analysis that politics was divided into populist and elitist issues. On social issues, Begala believed, the Democrats tended to take elitist positions and the Republicans populist ones; on economic issues, it was the reverse.

Both parties had nominated their elites in 1988 -- Dukakis and Bush. Neither man nor his ideas had been embraced by the public. The 1992 campaign had to be fought on economic ground....

When Clinton announced his presidential candidacy on October 3, 1991, at the Old State House in Little Rock Arkansas, he said that his central goal was "restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class." He made ten references to the middle class in his seven-page announcement and promised a middle-class tax cut. "Middle-class people are spending more hours on the job, less time with their children, and bringing home a smaller paycheck to pay more for health care and housing and education," he said.
---------------- [end excerpt]

{The Agenda, by Bob Woodward.
Copyright 1994. Simon & Schuster,
New York.}

-30-

The Flexible Thinkers

Yesterday, typing and trying to analyze-and-understand things -- and I thought and typed the following:

The vet called it "misplaced territorial aggression": because Genie couldn't get at the "foreign" outdoor cat, she turned her territory-protecting instincts on her housemate cat, with whom she ordinarily got along great. ...

That's what I wonder, if -- when we had the common enemy of Soviet communists, there was a balance in the world, a long-standing balance, crossing a couple of generations -- and then with that gone, it was like a vacuum, and some people's "territorial aggression" (or general, formerly submerged hostility) got "misplaced" onto their fellow Americans. And they became like Genie-the-cat, attacking their friends and neighbors and co-workers.

------------------------------------------------
In his book, Get Anyone To Do Anything, David J. Lieberman, Ph.D., writes -- in Chapter 21, "How to Get Any Group of People to Get Along" --
[quote]: Whether it's bickering friends or a feuding family, these techniques will quickly melt away disagreement and provide a core of unity among all members.

Numerous studies conclude that division among people dissolves when there is an opposing outside threat. External events arouse our need for affiliation and we will seek out support, creating a heightened sense of unity. Civil warring, intersocietal conflicts, and internal unrest often cease when a common outside enemy comes on to the scene. Conversely, individuals will turn their attention and hostility on one another when no outside forces are present. {italics mine}

[My own insert: Pres. Reagan (in 1989): "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And -- great, they did, but then who were we supposed to be suspicious of, and mad at, if not Soviet communists? -- we lost our "outside threat," or common enemy, and people began turning on each other in our own country -- road rage, deteriorating atmosphere in some workplaces, hate-radio and rant-tv, etc. ...?...]

[back to Lieberman]
The fastest way to instill cooperation within a group is to (a) create an external threat or (b) simply set your group against another group in some form of competition. A common enemy brings opposing sides together faster than any other type of group cohesion technique.

This phenomenon is also characteristic of how people respond within their own lives and minds....It's for this reason that those who have nothing going on in their lives are often the most neurotic. Without an external focus to occupy their attention their mind begins to turn in on itself. But once an objective is created our attention is turned outward. So too do groups who are confronted with a serious issue find that infighting quickly gives way to this new objective.

Also interesting is a study done by Ross and Samuels (1993) who found that the name given to a game has greater influence on the level of competitiveness than the individuals' personalities. They found that when participants played a game they believed to be called Wall Street they were much more competitive than their counterparts playing the same game, believing it was called Community Game. This is so fascinating because something as seemingly minor as the name of the game can override the members' personalities. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that within your group careful consideration should be given to the name of subsets as well as the overall group name. For instance, if you have two sections of your group with names such as The Righteous and The Victors, chances are you won't be inspiring as much cooperation as with names such as Common Ground and The Flexible Thinkers.

-----------[end quote]
{Get Anyone To Do Anything, by David J.
Lieberman. Copyright 2000. St. Martin's
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.}

-30-

misplaced

A couple of years ago I was puzzling about some things, and I asked a friend what he thought about it -- recently I found a spot in one of my notebooks where I wrote down notes about that conversation:

-------------------- I asked R what happened in the 13 years when I was out of the Local Swirl -- working on a statewide level, as far as travel -- I said, Is it me? Did I get too accustomed to being only with people in a relatively narrow demographic and -- lose perspective? Or did society and daily culture become meaner and stupider in those 13 years?

R said people's style and behavior became meaner and stupider. He didn't think about it -- he spoke immediately and decisively.

He said, "I don't know why."
I asked, "Is it the whole country, or is it just the town where we live?"
R said, "It's the whole country."

And it wasn't like -- wanting to "put down" people -- it was just behavior we were wondering at. ...it was like, random, scatter-shot hostility, and deliberate rudeness -- not everywhere, but in a lot of places.

--------------
In September I read this -- when the book and tapes were coming out from Caroline Kennedy, with 1964 interviews given by Jackie Kennedy...this Comment was on the internet:

--------------------"When I read... during breakfast that May morning that Jackie had died, I ...cried, ...not just for Jackie's passing but more especially for the final passing of what was a better, more American era, one of hope, challenges to our better selves, far-sightedness and elegance. Had I known then how far we were to descend since 1994, I would have cried ... much longer."

------------------------
That Comment-er was noticing things similar to what I had noticed, I thought....

Trying to imagine a reason, or reasons, for these transformations, I've blamed reality shows, talk shows, economic changes that harm working people, Congress' lack of responsiveness to Real World Challenges, the undeclared war on America's middle class...

and an idea which keeps re-surfacing is this:
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it was this -- seismic change on Planet Earth. Communism was no longer a threat. And it strikes me that maybe -- lacking the Soviet Union as Common Enemy, Americans unconsciously turned that warehoused Mistrust and Hostility on each other.

Like -- I used to have a cat named Genie who lived a long and happy Cat Life -- one of the few times when she was NOT happy was if she would see an outdoor cat walking by outside in the yard. She would freak out, on these occasions, and attack the other cat, Chess, whacking him with her paws, running at him, and snarling like a cheetah. It was really scary. Once she knocked over a piece of furniture in my writing studio.

The vet called it "misplaced territorial aggression": because Genie couldn't get at the "foreign" outdoor cat, she turned her territory-protecting instincts on her housemate cat, with whom she ordinarily got along great. ...

That's what I wonder, if -- when we had the common enemy of Soviet communists, there was a balance in the world, a long-standing balance, crossing a couple of generations -- and then with that gone, it was like a vacuum, and some people's "territorial aggression" (or general, formerly submerged hostility) got "misplaced" onto their fellow Americans. And they became like Genie-the-cat, attacking their friends and neighbors and co-workers.

I wonder if there is anything in this theory.
David J. Lieberman has a chapter on this type of bonding, and creating a sense of unity through opposition to a common enemy in his book, Get Anyone To Do Anything.
Going to look it up.

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bud-cat

Chess Pacific,
cat of thoughts;
alert and
flexible
and restful
and smart;
a man of affection
and style, courage, and
imagination --
warm,
with studied peacefulness
on the
blanket,
under the lamp-light
Tuned-in
to God and the universe.

-30-

hubris and pronouns

I read this on the internet --
the pub. is called "InvestorPlace"
I'm re-typing it here, so that I can think about it and try to learn what there is to know.

---------------------
Bank of America CEO Takes Hubris to New Level by Chastising Public
by Jeff Reeves / October 26, 2011 3:34 pm

Bank of America is one of the most hated companies in America -- and for good reason. BAC stock is down 50% this year and over 85% from its 2008 peak. Bank of America plans on instating a $5-per-month debit-card fee at the beginning of next year. It took billions in bailout money while regular Americans continue to face stagnant wages, runaway inflation and no relief from the brutal realities of both the housing market and job market.

But apparently Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan thinks we are all being a bit too hard on him and his cronies.

"I, like you, get a little incensed when you think about how much good all of you do, whether it's volunteer hours, charitable giving we do, serving clients and customers well," Moynihan said to employees last week, according to a Bloomberg report. "You ought to think a little about that before you start yelling at us."

{Insert from BluCol. Lit.: that's a mixed up paragraph -- at the beginning the pronoun "you" appears to refer to Bank-America employees; then in the last sentence "you" suddenly seems to refer to someone else who's "yelling at" bank of am. ...These folks are mixed up -- or careless...And also -- "clients and customers"? Aren't those two words for same thing?}

[Reeves article, continued]: Really? Do you really want us to think more about the antics of Bank of America and expect that reflection to benefit you?

OK, fine. Here are a few musings citizens are chewing over:

Your predecessor, CEO Ken Lewis, was indicted by the SEC on civil charges but never faced jail time. Whatever fines and legal fees he ultimately will incur for his tenure are more than offset by a jaw-dropping $125 million severance package.
Even as you proposed to gouge consumers with a $5 debit card fee, Bank of America wrote a final paycheck worth $6 million to former wealth-management division head Sallie Krawcheck. Another manager, Joseph Price, got a $5 million payday. That means the first 2.2 million debit-card charges will go solely to paying off these BofA lackeys.

Your $5 fee just so happens to coincide with"tests" by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo over a $3 fee, prompting calls for an investigation that the big dogs in the financial sector are colluding to roll out fees at the same time -- browbeating consumers into suffering through the charges because there will be fewer alternatives.

The government is suing BofA (along with 16 others) for its role in the mortgage debacle.
Bank of America placed 28th out of 30 in a recent American Banker survey of bank reputations.
The list goes on. And through it all, the pompous Moynihan is due up to $10 million in performance-based cash and bonuses this year.

{Blu.Col.Lit: "Performance-based." Hmm. Sounds like a phrase that gets attached to make it sound like somebody deserves the bonus they receive. If I paid someone a bonus, I wouldn't call it "a performance-based bonus"; I'd call it a "bonus." Period. I'd only be nervous about justifying it with a phrase such as "performance-based" if I thought it wasn't justified. And if I thought paying the employee a bonus was not justified, I'd just -- keep the money! - (hello?) There's definitely a nervous sort of language of trying to fumble around & make things sound legitimate. Hmmmmh.
When I think of "performance," think of singing - dancing: did Bank of America's Brian Moynihan perform "Proud Mary"?...}

[back to Reeves]: Sorry, Brian. It's not us -- it's you. And boneheaded comments like this one are just further proof that Bank of America's hubris knows no bounds. Maybe you had a sympathetic audience among your employees when you made that aninine statement, but the rest of America isn't fooled one bit.

--------------------------
This trend seemed like it started with the Enron thing -- what year was that?
It seems like after that you hear so much about two things:
-- executives basically looting companies, sometimes bankrupting them,
&, 2
-- business basically being adversarial to consumers: like -- How can we rip them off? What can we get them to believe? How can we batter money out of them? How can we trick them and fool them?

It's behavior unbecoming in this Free Country that we love.
We were supposed to be setting an example,
but since collapse of Soviet Union it seems like some sectors of our business community have run wild, in a negative way.

Instead of taking the opportunity to lead, and innovate, they took the opportunity to basically loot and rob companies, & cheat consumers, while screaming about "government regulation."

I asked a guy once, Why, after Pres. Reagan de-regulated the airlines, did air service not get better and cheaper, but instead became worse and more expensive?
I was like, 'That's the opposite of what we thought de-regulation was supposed to do.'
He answered, when companies are that big, de-regulation doesn't work; greed takes over.
He was a lobbyist, at the time -- (Oh, one of those bad words), and a --
Republican -- another bad word, to some folks, and, on the other hand,
something to be touted & worshiped, to other folks -- truth is,
[GGOOONNNGGG!] --
Neither! -- just ...folks...

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smite me

Idealistic Student, (to Reb Tevye): "Money's the world's curse!"

Reb Tevye, (to the Heavens): "May the Lord smite me with it --
and --
May I Never RECOVER!!"

("Fiddler On The Roof")

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it's paradise

Hoagy Carmichael.
Hoagy --
was the man's name.
Hoagy Carmichael --
wrote this song:

Memphis in June,
A shady veranda

Under a Sunday blue sky

Memphis in June
And Cousin Amanda ’s
Makin’ a rhubarb pie

I can hear the clock inside
Tickin’ and tockin’
Everything’s peacefully dandy

I can see old Granny
'Cross the street
Still a-rockin’
Watchin’ the neighbors go by

Memphis in June --
And sweet oleander
Blowing perfume
In the air

Up jumps the moon
To make it that much grander
It’s paradise
Brother take my advice
Nothing’s half as nice as --
Memphis in June

[Instrumental - piano]

Memphis in June
And sweet oleander
Blowing perfume
In the air

Up jumps a moon
To make it -- that much grander

It’s paradise

Brother take my advice

Nothin’s half as nice
As Memphis in June


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fish or cut bait

{excerpt}
During a discussion of funeral plans, Jackie was "very well composed," said Gore. She proposed that instead of a standard eulogy, the service include brief remarks with quotes from Jack's speeches and favorite passages from the Bible. She...requested...Ecclesiastes 3:1--8: "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven...." (It would be two more years before "Turn, Turn, Turn," the hit song by The Byrds, would popularize those verses as a call for world peace.)

...Sorensen couldn't help being amused by Jackie's Ecclesiastes request. He remembered when Jack had read the verses to her with the coda, "and a time to fish and a time to cut bait."

----------------- {end Excerpt}
[Grace And Power, by Sally Bedell Smith.
Copyright, 2004. Random
House, New York]

----------------------------------
To every thing
there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born,
and a time to die;
a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak...

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disappearing railroad blues

Thinking yesterday of Carl Sandburg, then reading up a little about him (doesn't feel right to say, "I googled Carl Sandburg" -- sounds a bit disrespectful, or improper...) -- come to find out, among the things he wrote is an epic poem entitled "Good Morning America" --

that only makes the song "City Of New Orleans" run on an obsessive endless loop in brain...

good morning America, how are ya?
Don't you know me, I'm your native son?
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. ...

Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie, and all the boys...

...and turns out was written by Steve Goodman
(whose name I can't forget because of the song, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" -- David Allen Coe, "...now a friend o' mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song, & he told me it was the perfect country and western song..."

back to top -- it seems reasonable to me to imagine that the phrase "good morning America" was probably borrowed by songwriter Steve Goodman from Carl Sandburg's poem title...
cool

somewhere read that Bob Dylan traveled down to North Carolina in early 1960s, to meet Carl Sandburg. At that time, Dylan was very young, and Sandburg very old. ...Bob turned up with some friends on the Sandburg front porch, and the newly popular folk singer ("Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'...) told Mr. Sandburg, "I'm a great admirer of your work" -- Carl Sandburg had no idea who Bob Dylan was, but invited him and his posse in for tea and sandwiches and apparently sat around and visited for a while.
would love to have heard that conversation ...
[where's a 'reality-tv' yahoo with camera-and-recording-equipment when you NEED him?? they record all the wrong stuff...!)

------------------------------------------
"Fog" is the well-known, short Sandburg poem -- fog comes on little cat feet...
sometimes people joke -- The cat comes in on little fog feet ...

-30-

little feet

76. Fog


The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.



--Carl Sandburg

-30-

...like overheard party conversation...

Some people who influence your life, clearly and straightforwardly say and do things to
teach
you
and
help you, and encourage you. Others have a more round-a-bout path -- you learn from them, too, if you're listening and can "dig" it -- they aren't directly engaged in Your priorities or enthusiasms, but they share theirs, along with their knowledge and stories and observations, aloud mostly because they like telling it.

And you can be entertained / enlightened or not -- you may absorb at will. Like crackers on a plate -- you can take one if you want to.

------------- The vagaries of fortune, the gratuitous bitchery, and random meanness people may encounter; whether an individual allows events and jerks to "beat them to death" psychologically, is partly in the individual's control (we can consciously choose our response) and partly not.

------------------------------------
[selection / "Ulysses"]

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world...
...for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Off all the western stars, until I die...

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-------------------
[Alfred Lord Tennyson,
from the poem "Ulysses"]
-30-

proportion

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves."

-- Emund Burke
Irish political philosopher
1729 - 1797

-30-

goodtrend

The power of
trend
is amazing:

this moment in human history is an Opportunity
(it seems like)
for Business leaders in the "Real World"

to take the lead
and build their own power,
and rival Wall Street banks-too-big-to-fail and other corrupt organizations,

by modeling
civilized behavior
and
positive accomplishments.

Congress doesn't lead;
Real People in the Real World
can build positive power,
by leading.

By -- just doing it.

-30-

forgotten mantra

Yoga is difficult.

Ehrm -- A-a-ack.

Think I wasn't cut out to be a Zen Buddhist yogi.

(If I were practicing meditation, I'd probably wind up like the Jeff Goldblum character with the cameo in the film Annie Hall: at a swingin' Los Angeles party, he is intense on the telephone (a "cord-ful" phone), his back turned toward the crowd noise, speaking urgently into the receiver, "Uh, yes I -- forgot my mantra!"

That'd be me. ...)

Doing it (yoga) on bedroom carpet this morning, thought -- how LONG can thirty seconds last??!
On a sheet of paper pulled from a magazine I had, are -- 6 or eight pictures, showing a position, or pose that you're supposed to get into and then hold for 30 seconds.

Then you go to the next pose, and do that one for 30 seconds.
And that's exercise.
It really is.
In Western-world-mind, we're used to exercise being -- go, go, go. Step, step, step. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Jump, kick, twist, bounce -- lift, lift, lift.

In the Eastern-style, it's supposed to be -- stretch, make effort, and Relax-in-the-effort. And hold.
And the ubiquitous admonition: "Don't forget to breathe!"
(At least when I follow the pictures from the magazine I don't have annoying exhortations like that coming at me from the TV, as is the case when following a show...)

I keep a clock with a second-hand next to me, & position it, with each new Yoga position so that wherever my face is, I can SEE that clock so I know when I'm done holding the pose.

I adjusted the 30-seconds to 25, for each pose.
Enough already.

-30-

there ain't no time to wonder why

A recent article in the New York Times about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement attracted Reader comments.

I copied-and-pasted two of those comments here -- to contemplate.

Comment 1 refers to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision: that decision said that a corporation is a person.

One might think, Well, it doesn't seem like that's true -- why would our Supreme Court say that?
Apparently that decision let down the flood-gates that had been preventing powerful multinational corporations from drenching political candidates in financing.

Comment 2 mentions farm subsidies. (Now, since I live in a state where agriculture is an important industry, I tend to buy into the idea that farm subsidies are in essence a "cheap food" policy: if we [our government] didn't help farmers stay in business, then two multinational corporations (or should I say, two "persons") would own all the land, hire the farming done, and maximize profits to themselves: i.e., a loaf of bread would cost $1400, etc. ...)

Comment 2 also mentions the 99% and the 1% -- looked it up, they're referring to statistics which say in the past 25 years 1% of Americans have increased their wealth while the other 99% have slid back. (It isn't 'cause folks aren't working harder, that's for sure!)

------------------------------
COMMENT 1:

These people hate that they have no voice, they have lost any chance to express their opinion, and have it matter to those who no longer represent them. The systems sells its influence to the rich because they alone can afford it. The corporations, take Pre-Tax profits and buy their influence, and the Supreme Court rubber stamps this undermining of the fundamental democracy that is supposed be the government OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE and FOR THE PEOPLE, by ruling that the corporation and all its money to undermine the nation is a person, a citizen. When did we last see a corporation return from war in a body bag ? If this doeasn't outrage you, you aren't much of an American.

------------------
COMMENT 2:

I believe we currently live in a Corpocracy not a Domocracy, our country currently is run for the large corporations not the people. The Corporations get the tax breaks. Even Congress, takes the tax breaks away with one hand and gives them back to the large corporations with the other hand. Just Sleight of Hand. For a current example look at the farm subsidies. We are 99% supporting the 1%
------------------------------ [end NYT Reader Comments]

People are upset, or psyched up, when they write, we can hear it when we read it. That doesn't make them right; it also doesn't make them wrong.

I don't know -- in the past four years I've met so many people who Don't Vote (I had no idea) and when the automatic words comes out of my mouth reminding them that their vote counts, they should vote, go-team!, whatever -- the person will say, "It doesn't make any difference." "There are no people like us in Congress." "They don't care." And it hurts to admit in my mind that they're not wrong.

-30-

blind love

Thinking about people doing things they feel stupid (and embarrassed) about later, made me think of Blind Ambition, and made me think next of "blind love"...

Blind Ambition was the name of a book written by John Dean, of the Nixon administration. Dean wrote the book about his own experiences during the events encompassed in what we called
Watergate.

The title of that book sums up the author's predicament, for which he blamed no one but himself.
blind ambition
It's like -- you don't see that you're doing wrong, because you want to
either
go to the top
or
achieve the high goals of your president.

Really, when you think about it that way, the crimes & misdemeanors of today's wall street crowd -- the "banksters," some call them -- are all for the simple goal of

their personal stratospheric Wealth

...
at least the Nixon crowd did the stuff they did for a Goal
of serving their president -- and, of course, they thought -- the country ...
(yikes -- Somebody, call Charles Colson! - we got somebody worse! -- seriously, just kidding...)

----------------------
There's a theory that the Personality of a Politician / Would-Be Leader includes
1) a love for people
and
2) a need to be loved by people

...like a singer or dancer or actor, etc. -- the candidate meets the cheers of the crowd as something he loves, craves, needs, and never wants to lose...

on the
flip side
of that, the candidate greets, smiles, shakes hands, hugs, laughs, and rubs-shoulders-generally with the crowds because he Loves Those People.

Even his opposition -- the people who compete against him, and sometimes call him names -- he loves them, TOO, damn it--he can't help himself...!

That's just a trait that -- if a person has it, they have it -- like being left-handed...

And if a person's organization and discipline of their sexual feelings is not strong -- if sex and love overlap and mix in -- and if the person has any history-or-habit of casual physical promiscuity, it's a pretty simple recipe (easy-bake!) for making some silly mistakes.

-------------------
I know one thing, if I live to be a thousand years old,
and I NEVER
have to read or hear
about the sex life or romantic life of ANY
politician or other public figure,
it'll-be-too-soon!

...

-30-

that highway sound

The motor cooled down, the heat went down
That's when I heard that highway sound.
Cadillac settin' like a ton of lead
A hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.
...
---------------------
Lyric from Chuck Berry's song, "Maybellene." Many rock experts call that the first rock-and-roll song.

I was reading, lately, two books by Bob Woodward (the Washington Post reporter who, along with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein, stumbled upon the events which came to be known as "Watergate"):
Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
and

The Agenda.

Woodward's writing style is plain, straightforward -- reporting:
This happened.
This other thing happened.
These people planned this;
these other people tried that;
so-and-so said this.

Not elaborate, or flowery. The style is impartial. He doesn't write to "lobby for" anything. He tries to present facts, and what they may mean.

[From The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House]: -----------------There was lots of resistance from the economic team.

"That's Nixon," said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, comparing Magaziner's idea to the Republican president's largely unsuccessful price freeze in the early 1970s.

Hillary argued that an immediate freeze would save an estimated $28 billion.

President Clinton backed his wife.---------------- [end excerpt]

-------------------
Chuck Berry's songwriting is like that, too -- the straightforward, This happened, then this, then -- THIS!-style.
You might call him the Bob Woodward of Rock and Roll.
Or -- Bob Woodward could be known as the Chuck Berry of journalism.

-----------
Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doing the things you used to do.

As I was motivatin' over the hill
I saw Maybellene in a Coup de Ville.
Cadillac rollin' on the open road,
Nothin' out-run my v8 Ford.
Cadillac doin' about ninety-five,
It was bumper to bumper, rollin' side to side.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've done started back doin’ the things you used to do.

Peeked in the mirror at the top of the hill,
just like swallowin' up a medicine pill.
First thing I saw that Cadillac grille
Doin' a hundred and ten, droppin' over that hill.
Uphill curve, downhill stretch,
Me and that Cadillac neck and neck.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've done started back doing the things you used to do.

The Cadillac pulled up to hundred-and-four,
The Ford got hot and wouldn't do no more.
It then got cloudy, it started to rain,
Tootin’ my horn for the passin' lane
Rain water blowin' all under my hood,
But I knew that was doin' my motor good.

Oh -- Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doin’ the things you used to do.

Now,
The motor cooled down, the heat went down
That's when I heard that highway sound.
Cadillac settin' like a ton of lead
A hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.
Cadillac lookin' like it's settin' still
And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh! Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You done started back doing the things you used to do.
--------------------
"Maybellene," Chuck Berry

-30-