fountains of imagination

 

A Coney Island of the Mind, 13

Not like Dante

discovering a commedia

upon the slopes of heaven

I would paint a different kind of Paradiso

in which the people would be naked 

as they always are

in scenes like that

because it is supposed to be 

a painting of their souls

but there would be no anxious angels telling them

how heaven is

the perfect picture of

a monarchy

and there would be no fires burning

in the hellish holes below

in which I might have stepped

nor any altars in the sky except

fountains of imagination

______________________________

     That's a poem written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

________________________________

     I first saw and heard this poet in The Last Waltz, a concert film with The Band, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and more.

_______________________

     Mr. Ferlinghetti died yesterday.

     Washington Post obituary:

------------------------------- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an acclaimed poet and longtime proprietor of City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore and avant-garde publishing house that catapulted the Beat Generation to fame and helped establish the city as a center of literary and cultural revolution, died Feb. 22 at his home in San Francisco.  He was 101.

...Intensely private and fiercely political, Mr. Ferlinghetti became a household name in the 1950s when he stood trial on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's hallucinatory anti-establishment manifesto "Howl."

The trial brought attention from around the world for Ginsberg, his ecstatically irreverent poem and, by extension, the entire Beat Generation -- a roving band of hipsters, poets and artists who rebelled against the country's conservatism, experimenting with literary forms as well as with drugs, sex and spirituality.

The "Howl" episode also cast Mr. Ferlinghetti as a heroic defender of free speech and a stalwart friend of the creative fringe.  In the resulting glare, City Lights became one of San Francisco's most enduring institutions--at once a source for edge-of-mainstream books, a gathering place for the city's wandering artists and a pilgrimage site for anarchists, radicals and liberal activists.

When not tending shop, Mr. Ferlinghetti retreated to the attic of an old Victorian house, where he had a typewriter and an expansive view of the city.  He wrote dozens of books, including one of the best-selling poetry volumes in American history:  "A Coney Island of the Mind" (1958), a plain-spoken, often wry critique of American culture.

Written to be performed aloud with a jazz accompaniment, "Coney Island" helped yank poetry out of the academy and into the streets.

"Christ climbed down / from His bare tree / this year," reads one poem, "and ran away to where / no intrepid Bible salesmen / covered the territory / in two-tone Cadillacs."

His own writing aside, Mr. Ferlinghetti was more widely known as a fixture at the center of the whirling counterculture that helped shape the nation's social landscape since the 1950s.  He was the bearded guru of San Francisco's art scene, as closely identified with the city as summer fog and the Golden Gate.

---------------------------------------

     He arrived in California in 1951 as a World War II veteran and a beret-sporting graduate of the Sorbonne.  Within two years, he had helped open City Lights, a tiny shop that specialized in selling and publishing paperbacks and little-known poetry.

Located in San Francisco's Italian-influenced North Beach neighborhood, City Lights quickly became the hangout of choice for the city's radical intelligentsia, particularly Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and the rest of the Beats.  The doors stayed open until midnight weekdays and 2 a.m. weekends, and even then it was hard to close on time....

"City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down and read books without being pestered to buy something," he told the New York Times in 1968.  "I had this idea that a bookstore should be a center of intellectual activity, and I knew it was a natural for a publishing company, too."

Mr. Ferlinghetti inaugurated the publishing arm of City Lights with the paperback Pocket Poet series in 1955.  Its first volume was his own "Pictures of the Gone World."

Over the years, he sought outsiders and underground voices, and his little press gave early exposure to writers who would come to define a generation:  Norman Mailer, Denise Levertov and, especially, the freewheeling Beats.

Mr. Ferlinghetti was clear-eyed about the fate of most avant-garde work.  "Publishing a book of poetry is still like dropping it off a bridge somewhere and waiting for a splash," he once said.  "Usually you don't hear anything."

The reaction was much louder when he published "Howl," a poem that enthralled him when he heard Ginsberg first perform it in 1955 at the Six Gallery, a converted auto repair shop in San Francisco.

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Mr. Ferlinghetti wrote in a telegram he sent to Ginsberg later that night, echoing the words once written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman.  "When do I get the manuscript?"

The poem's profanity and frank language about gay sex immediately drew censure when it was published in 1956.  After its second printing, in 1957, Mr. Ferlinghetti and City Lights manager Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested on obscenity charges.

Anticipating trouble, Mr. Ferlinghetti had alerted the American Civil Liberties Union before "Howl" ever went to press.

Mr. Ferlinghetti did not testify at the trial but he courted public opinion in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.  "I consider 'Howl' to be the most significant single long poem published in this country since World War II," he wrote.  "If it is also a condemnation of our official culture, if it is also an unseemly voice of dissent, perhaps this is really why officials object to it."

     Ultimately, Municipal Court Judge Clayton W. Horn acquitted Mr. Ferlinghetti, ruling that the poem had "redeeming social importance" and thus couldn't be judged obscene.

That precedent was later used to defend books such as "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn" against obscenity charges.

The trial helped create a lasting impression that Mr. Ferlinghetti was one of the Beats, a notion he always shrugged off.  He was older, he said, and more interested in tradition and technique--"the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats."

---------------------------------------------

Lawrence Monsanto Ferling was born in Yonkers, N.Y., on March 24, 1919.  He was the youngest of five sons of an Italian immigrant who shortened his surname upon arriving in the United States.  (Lawrence would later reclaim the full name as an adult.)

The elder Ferlinghetti died of a heart attack before Lawrence was born.  His mother, struggling to pay bills and disabled by grief, was institutionalized when he was a toddler.  Lawrence bounced between an uncle in Manhattan, an aunt in France and an orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y.  At one point, he was so malnourished that he developed rickets.

He was at once an overachiever and a delinquent, arrested for shoplifting the same month he made Eagle Scout.  Eventually he went to live in a New York suburb with a wealthy couple who sent him to a private boys school, where his roommate introduced him to Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, "Look Homeward, Angel."

Enthralled, Mr. Ferlinghetti chose to attend Wolfe's alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He graduated in 1941 with a degree in journalism.

During World War II, Mr. Ferlinghetti served in the Navy and arrived in Nagasaki just weeks after it was hit with an Allied atomic bomb.  The scenes he witnessed were the root of his lifelong opposition to war and nuclear weapons....

With G.I. Bill benefits, he received a master's degree from Columbia University and then lit out for Paris.

There, Mr. Ferlinghetti lived on the Left Bank...and wrote an unpublished novel and the dissertation for his doctorate in modern poetry.  He also met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith, with whom he had two children before they divorced in 1976.

Besides his son, Lorenzo Ferlinghetti of San Francisco, survivors include a daughter, Julie Sasser of Nashville; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco just as a bohemian arts renaissance led by the poet Kenneth Rexroth was beginning to draw notice on the East Coast.

"I used to make up all these literary reasons why I came out here," Mr. Ferlinghetti told his biographer, Barry Silesky.  "But I realize it was really because it sounded like a European place to come....

He fell in with Rexroth, a pacifist who called himself a "philosophical anarchist" and who held weekly underground salons that sparked Mr. Ferlinghetti's political awakening.

     Much of his best-known work -- such as the Cold War-era poem "Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower" -- was infused with political argument.

He also protested war and environmental destruction.  He had no patience for poets who disengaged from the world in order to write.

"When guns are roaring," Mr. Ferlinghetti once wrote, "the Muses have no right / to be silent!"

------------------------- Feb. 23, 2021.  Written by Emma Brown.

-30-

my weariness amazes me

 

"When I was a little kid in La Jolla, California, which is a very small town, we had a parade on the 4th of July and I remember clearly the sight of Civil War veterans marching down the main street, kicking up the dust.  

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, it brought back that memory.  

And I thought of him as something of a Civil War type.  

A kind of 19th century troubadour.  A maverick American spirit.  

The reediness of his voice and the spareness of his words go straight to the heart of America... the best way I could sum him up is to say - Bob Dylan has never been about to get out of town before the shootin' starts."

     (Gregory Peck, Kennedy Center Honors, 1997)

-30-

well it's all right, everything'll work out fine...

 

A central point, for me, in recent events is this:

Donald Trump said in 2016 that if he didn't win the election, then that would mean that the election was "rigged."

And he said that again in 2020 -- If I don't win then it was "rigged."

Well, no.  That statement is an obvious trick.

It would be like someone from the Kansas City Chiefs saying, before the 2021 Super Bowl, "If we don't win, then the football game was rigged."

Or someone from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers saying before this year's Super Bowl "if we don't win it was rigged."

     A statement like that is just another version of the coin-flip joke, "Heads I win; tails you lose."

A person can say it, but it is clearly not true.

I can say I'm the Queen of England, but it will not be true.

("If I am not the Queen of England, then Buckingham Palace is rigged"...?)

-30-

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

 

James Taylor

Last week The Guardian ran an article in their Culture section about Carole King's Tapestry album.

     "I Feel the Earth Move"

     "It's Too Late"

     "So Far Away"...

People pop on there and write Comments saying how much they like the album, and other records that were special to them.

One guy says his top albums are

Revolver

Highway 61 Revisited

Sticky Fingers.

Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone

Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you

I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song

I just can't remember who to send it to

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I'd see you again

Won't you look down upon me, Jesus

You've got to help me make a stand

You've just got to see me through another day

My body's aching and my time is at hand

And I won't make it any other way

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I'd seen you again

Been walking my mind to an easy time, my back

Turned towards the sun

Lord knows when the cold wind blows it'll turn your head around

Well, there's hours of time on the telephone line, to talk about things to come

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I'd see you baby, one more time again, now

Thought I'd see you one more time again

There's just a few things coming my way this time around, now

Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you, fire and rain, now

______________________________

{"Fire and Rain" - written by James Taylor}

-30-

little arts

 

The Washington Post

Opinion by George F. Will, Columnist:

Will Senate Republicans allow their louts to rule the party?

_________________________________

---------------- The first of this century's national traumas is denoted by two numbers:  9/11.  One purpose of, and a sufficient justification for, the second impeachment of the 45th president was to inscribe this century's second trauma in the nation's memory as:  1/6.

Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling.  Long before 9/11, Americans knew that foreign fanaticisms were perennial dangers.  

After 1/6, Americans know what their Constitution's Framers knew:  In any democracy, domestic fanaticisms always are, potentially, rank weeds that flourish when fertilized by persons who are as unscrupulous as they are prominent.

The Framers are, to the 45th president, mere rumors.  They, however, knew him, 

as a type -- a practitioner of what Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 68) disdainfully called "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity."  Post-1/6 America has a quickened appreciation of how those "little arts," when magnified by modern modes of mass communication as wielded by occupants of the swollen modern presidency, make civilization's brittle crust crumble.

Intelligent people of goodwill disagree about the constitutionality of an impeachment trial of a former president.  Forty-four Republican senators voted (generally less from constitutional conviction than from political convenience) to truncate the trial.  

They lost, but their role as jurors remained.  In that constitutional role their duty was to decide whether the president's two months of inciting what occurred on 1/6 constituted an impeachable offense.  As this is written on Friday, only the size of the see-no-evil Republican majority is in doubt.

The presentation by the House impeachment managers was a demonstration, the more welcome for its rarity, of congressional conscientiousness and meticulousness.  

Congress is an investigating institution, for three purposes:  To establish the need for particular legislation.  To provide oversight of the operation of existing laws and the institutions they undergird.  

     And to inform voters about matters that they must understand in order for representative government to function.  The investigative aspect of impeachment proceedings serves this third purpose.

Information is inherently good, and the trial was a cornucopia of information about the sights and sounds of 1/6.  And about the Republican Party.  Its congressional membership overwhelmingly says, and perhaps believes, that 1/6, and the low presidential intrigues that preceded it, were not violations of the presidential oath to defend the Constitution.

As the trial proceeded, there appeared a new aspirant for membership in the Republican senators' large Lout Caucus:  Lindsey O. Graham (South Carolina), Ted Cruz (Texas), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Marco Rubio (Florida), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), et al.  

     In Ohio, Josh Mandel announced his candidacy to replace Rob Portman, the temperate conservative and meticulous legislator who is retiring in 2022.  Mandel said the impeachment "got my blood boiling to the point where I decided to run."  His blood boils frequently:  This will be his third Senate run.

His agenda for creating a more perfect union is "to pulverize the uni-party," meaning "this group of Democrats and Republicans who sound exactly the same and are more interested in getting invited to the cocktail party circuit than they are in standing up for the Constitution."  

With his stupefying unoriginality, Mandel sounds exactly like innumerable congressional Republicans who clawed their way to Washington by espousing an anti-Washington-cocktail-circuit stance as conservatism.  Mandel has perfect pitch for populism's rhetorical banalities.

...Today's two major parties have framed political competition since the middle of the 19th century -- since the Republicans rose from the rubble of the Whigs.  An essential conservative insight about everything is that nothing necessarily endures.  Care must be taken.  The Republican Party will wither if the ascendant Lout Caucus is the face it presents to this nation of decent, congenial people. ------------------------- End

________________________

reader comments

~~  Funny how Republicans join 'the establishment' by knocking it, and then will do absolutely anything, including sedition, to stay IN 'the establishment'.

~~  Republicans decided to let the louts take over back in 2010--remember the tea party?  They weren't just guys in tricorn hats.  Their protest signs were viciously racist, they talked openly about killing the president for "treason", they carried weapons at their demonstrations.  

The GOP has been a sanctuary for bigots, con artists, authoritarians, bible beaters, and cuckoo bananas conspiracy theorists for at least the last decade.

~~  Where the eff have you been, Mr. Will?  The louts have been running the Republican Party since Lee Atwater.

~~  There are three qualifications for being a Republican candidate, now:

1) drooling loyalty to Trump

2) mediocrity so aggressive that it sinks to the level of imbecility

3) absolutely no ideology other than #1, above.

~~  "Will Senate Republicans allow their louts to rule the party?"

Is this a trick question?

~~  Josh Mandel is such a weasel.  He was involved in student government when I was in grad school at Ohio State in the late '90s, and there was more than one occasion where he got in trouble because he couldn't be bothered to color inside the lines.  By all accounts, he's gotten even worse since then.

~~  Let us not be too quick to accept this Republican "abandonment" of Trump; that is part of the whitewash.

     The GOP is animated by a marriage of social conservatism (zealous intolerance and racism), economic libertarianism (corporate welfare and income inequality) and foreign policy hawkishness (other people's children getting killed for economic libertarianism).  

Republicans consider laws, morals, ethics, and honesty as weaknesses to be exploited for profit; this--and active harmful measures against minorities--is their platform.  

Republicans have always defended vertically integrated corporate monopoly, tax cuts bankrupting the federal budget for corporate subsidies, and ignoring human rights as inconvenient obstacles to corporate profit.  

At least since 1980, Republicans have sought to "govern" in the same manner as the Nazis did during the short-lived Weimar Republic, to purposefully destroy the government from the inside.  

The slurry of financial, sexual, violent, and ethically questionable actions and crimes is normal Republican behaviour, just more obvious under Trump because of its non-apologetic openness.

Republicans own Trump.  They are Trump.  To their core, their essence, their marrow.  Trump is the conjoined twin of every Republican running for or in office at every level nationwide.  

No Republican is excused or exempt from complete association, complicity, or enabling of Trump's every action and utterance since January 2017.  

Republicans used Trump as a distraction from their quiet enacting of the agenda cited above, which remains the same.  

Only now Trump has become inconvenient does the public distancing start.

-30-

it seems to me I've heard that song before...

 

Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer

(younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales)

---------------------------------------------------

"Extremism is a veiled longing for death."

~ Milan Kundera

_________________

BBC News

QAnon:  What is it and where did it come from?

by Mike Wendling

6 January

------------------ [excerpt] ------------------ QAnon is a wide-ranging, completely unfounded theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested....

That's the basic story, but there are so many offshoots, detours and internal debates that the total list of QAnon claims is enormous--and often contradictory.  Adherents draw on news events, historical facts and numerology to develop their own far-fetched conclusions. ------------------------- [end, excerpt]

___________________________________

______________________________

     I saw a news-clip video on You Tube titled,

Biden's inauguration led to mom escaping QAnon

     It is short, and interesting.  This young mother they interview just speaks and reflects on how she became involved with believing some of the QAnon stuff online.

     She said her family had always been all Republicans, and so that's how she votes, automatically.  She said, "I just did what I was told."

some of the Comments from viewers --

Dan Gerchcovich

     As a foreigner, the US election has been crazy to watch.  I hope your next election will be a lot more stable.

-------------------- white supremacy in the south during the Civil Rights movement said the same thing as the trump base did.  Talking about freedom of speech, state rights and that anyone opposing them were communists.

------------- The hypocrisy of Republican legislators is clear.  Honesty, truth, integrity, principle and values don't matter.   Winning is all that matters to them.

Luis Boqcas

     One thing that is strange for me in Americans is that they identify themselves as being republicans or democrats, not all, but 50-55% of people feel that party is part of their identity.  

     That is really strange, uncommon in the rest of the world and in today's time a weakness for a democratic society.

-------------------------- yea I think we need to get rid of the parties because people can't focus on the real issues.  At this point the parties are just a distraction.

------------------- Parties are required for a democracy to function but, unless you want to be a politician, makes no sense that they are part of your identity.  

     They need to pitch their ideas to you for you to decide who gets your vote, not something you inherit from your parents or from where you live.

HD

     QAnon logic:  2 + 2 = "bowling ball"

-30-

wish I didn't have all of this money

 

Paul Mellon

A Reader Comment on a Washington Post book review:

---------------------------- Years ago, a Bed and Breakfast guest shared with me a conversation she had with Paul Mellon, in which the noted philanthropist confided to her:

"I wish I didn't have all of this money.  I'd much rather own and manage a small book store."

     This offhand musing seemed kind of odd to me, because I kind of make the assumption that if someone has lots of money they may do anything they want, including buy a small bookstore and run it.

     But I suppose having so much money -- the Mellon fortune was huge -- kind of obligates you to carry out certain responsibilities, and perhaps becomes a "job" in itself.

     Kind of like -- I saw a You Tube video of Princess Diana's brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer:  he was discussing Althorp, the family's ancient stately home in the English countryside.  At first one might think, "Oh great, I inherit a giant mansion" but in truth it's an ongoing job and responsibility.

     Those old houses are full of history and special paintings and furniture that isn't just a -- couch, for example, but it's a piece from back in the 1500s and so-and-so had it and it represents this-and-such historical period.  An old house such as Althorp and its contents, are considered by the powers-that-be, and indeed by the British people, to belong both to the family and to the nation.

     And then you have to keep it up -- the maintenance would be no joke, and the continuous restoration of something that old -- trying to keep it livable for your own family, and nice for visitors, and also preserve all the history....  To help get money to do this, even though they are rich, they still have to open the home for sightseers during part of the year.  It would be like you lived at a museum.  (But yet you don't bitch about it because it's an honor, and you are fortunate, right?...)

     To me, that relates to Paul Mellon's idea of the road he did not travel (one lined with bookshops...?) -- because contrary to the concept that large inheritance gives a person freedom, in reality the circumstance may place the person in certain roles and positions which are not all fun and games, but rather obligations and responsibilities.

______________________________

English people take their history super-seriously:  they are intense about it.  In The Diana Chronicles (2007, Broadway Books-Random House) Tina Brown wrote,

     Althorp House evolved from the red-bricked, moated redoubt of the first Earl into a princely power house with a superb collection of eighteenth-century furniture, a world-famous library, and a picture gallery hung with masterpieces by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, and George Stubbs.  

In the words of a leading historian of the aristocracy, David Cannadine, "The Spencers were the very embodiment of glamour and grandeur, high rank and high living." ------------------------------- 

And then this other passage from the same book illustrates how the paintings in your picture gallery and the books in your library belong to you -- and to the country.

-------------------- [excerpt] --------------- ...When the Earl of Warwick went so far as to flee his ancient family seat of Warwick Castle for an apartment in New York, taking with him a cache of Old Masters that the nation expected to stay right where they were. -------------------------------- 

-30-

tell it to me again, that I might understand

 

I found a video on You Tube that was made January 6th at the Capitol Building as events unfolded.

title:

CBS News Special Report-Protestors Roit U.S. Capital Building-2:24p.m. E.T (1-6-2021)

uploader:  JFK1963NewsVideos

Several misspellings in that title -- that happens sometimes on you tube videos:  either people are in a big hurry when they type it in, or maybe the misspellings help make it easier to locate the video and differentiate it from others...  I don't know.

     This one is about 4 hours long, so it's a real-time report, as it happened.  And the advantage for listeners who want to get work done at home or at the office while the video plays, you don't have to keep going back to your device to select a new video, as one would have to if you got started with 6-minute and 8-minute and 1-minute videos.

-30-

names, faces, places

 

In the New York Times today, this headline --

Arrested in Capitol Riot:  Organized Militants and a Horde of Radicals

     "horde"

     A word not that commonly used in the modern era.  We hear its homophone, "hoard" more often now because of the popularity of "hoarders" TV shows.

     "Horde" is a bunch of people.

     Or -- the word crowd means a bunch of people.  The word horde kind of implies --

a bunch of people who are up to no good.

In today's paper online, they show photos of many of the people being charged in January 6th's Capitol Hill disturbance -- for a few of them there's no picture, just a blank shadow.  

     Hover your cursor over a photo or shadow and words will appear telling the person's name and where they're from.

26 charged with conspiracy crimes or assault:

^  Daniel Page Adams

Goodrich, Texas

^  Wilmar Jeovanny Montano Alvarado

Houston, Texas

^  Thomas Edward Caldwell

Berryville, Virginia

^  Mathew Capsel

Illinois

^  Donovan Ray Crowl

Woodstock, Ohio

^  Nicholas DeCarlo

Fort Worth, Texas

^  Lisa Marie Eisenhart

Woodstock, Georgia

^  Scott Kevin Fairlamb

Stockholm, New Jersey

^  Michael Joseph Foy

Wixom, Michigan

^  Robert Gieswein

Woodland Park, Colorado

^  Alex Kirk Harkrider

Carthage, Texas

^  Emanuel Jackson

^  Douglas Austin Jensen

Des Moines, Iowa

^  Chad Barrett Jones

Coxs Creek, Kentucky

^  Edward Jacob Lang

New York

^  Mark Jefferson Leffingwell

Seattle, Washington

^  Patrick Edward McCaughey III

Ridgefield, Connecticut

^  Eric Gavelek Munchel

Nashville, Tennessee

^  Ryan Taylor Nichols

Longview, Texas

^  Nicholas R. Ochs

Honolulu, Hawaii

^  William Pepe

Beacon, New York

^  Dominic Pezzola

Rochester, New York

^  Ryan Stephen Samsel

Bristol, Pennsylvania

^  Robert Sanford

Boothwyn, Pennsylvania

^  Barton Wade Shively

Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania

^  Jessica Marie Watkins

Champaign County, Ohio

43 are charged with interference with law enforcement, weapons crimes, threats or property crimes but not conspiracy or assault

^  Christopher Michael Alberts

Pylesville, Maryland

^  Tommy Frederick Allan

Rocklin, California

^  Richard Barnett

Gravette, Arkansas

^  Craig Michael Bingert

Slatington, Pennsylvania

^  Gina Michelle Bisignano

Beverly Hills, California

^  Samuel Camargo

Florida

^  Jacob Anthony Chansley

Phoenix, Arizona

^  Lonnie Leroy Coffman

Falkville, Alabama

^  Nolan B. Cooke

Savoy, Texas

^  Gracyn Dawn Courtright

Hurricane, West Virginia

^  Nathaniel J. DeGrave

Las Vegas, Nevada

^  Hunter Allen Ehmke

Glendora, California

^  Troy Elbert Faulkner

Columbus, Ohio

^  Gabriel Augustin Garcia

Miami, Florida

^  Vitali GossJankowski

Naples, Florida

^  Christopher Ray Grider

Texas

^  Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli

Colts Neck, New Jersey

^  Stephanie Hazelton

Medford, New Jersey

^  Emily Hernandez

Sullivan, Missouri

^  Jerod Wade Hughes

East Helena, Montana

^  Joshua Calvin Hughes

East Helena, Montana

^  Adam Johnson

Parrish, Florida

^  Klete Derik Keller

Colorado Springs, Colorado

^  Joshua R. Lollar

Spring, Texas

^  Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr.

Colorado

^  Garret Miller

Richardson, Texas

^  Matthew Ryan Miller

Cooksville, Maryland

^  Jorden Robert Mink

Oakdale, Pennsylvania

^  Aaron Mostofsky

Brooklyn, New York

^  Joshua Pruitt

Silver Spring, Maryland

^  Guy Wesley Reffitt

Wylie, Texas

^  Jeffrey P. Sabol

^  Ronald L. Sandlin

Long Beach, California

^  Hunter Seefried

Laurel, Delaware

^  Troy Anthony Smocks

Dallas, Texas

^  Michael Sparks

Elizabethtown, Kentucky

^  Peter Francis Stager

Conway, Arkansas

^  Justin Stoll

Wilmington, Ohio

^  Brandon Straka

New York

^  John Earle Sullivan

Salt Lake City, Utah

^  Dustin Byron Thompson

Columbus, Ohio

^  William Wright Watson

Auburn, Alabama

^  Riley June Williams

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

107 are charged with trespassing or disrupting Congress only

^  Rasha N. Abual-Ragheb

Fairfield, New Jersey

^  Stephen Michael Ayres

Ohio

^  Dawn Bancroft

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

^  Thomas Baranyi

Ewing, New Jersey

^  Robert L. Bauer

Cave City, Kentucky

^  Damon Michael Beckley

Cub Run, Kentucky

^  Andrew Ryan Bennett

Columbia, Maryland

^  Bryan Betancur

Silver Spring, Maryland

^  Joseph Randall Biggs

Ormond Beach, Florida

^  Joshua Matthew Black

Leeds, Alabama

^  Matthew Bledsoe

Memphis, Tennessee

^  James Bonet

Glen Falls, New York

^  Larry Rendall Brock Jr.

Grapevine, Texas

^  Terry Brown

Myerstown, Pennsylvania

^  William McCall Calhoun Jr.

Americus, Georgia

^  Albert A. Ciarpelli

Syracuse, New York

^  Josiah Colt

Meridian, Idaho

^  Cody Page Carter Connell

Vivian, Louisiana

^  Matthew Ross Council

Riverview, Florida

^  Jenny Louise Cudd

Midland, Texas

^  Michael Curzio

Summerfield, Florida

^  Michael Shane Daughtry

Newton, Georgia

^  Karl Friedrich-Johannes Dresch

Calumet, Michigan

^  Valerie Elaine Ehrke

Arbuckle, California

^  Andrew C. Ericson

Muskogee, Oklahoma

^  Derrick Evans

Prichard, West Virginia

^  Thomas Fee

Freeport, New York

^  Brandon Fellows

Schenectady, New York

^  Samuel J. Fisher

New York

^  Cindy Fitchett

Cobbs Creek, Virginia

^  Jacob Fracker

Rocky Mount, Virginia

^  Thomas Gallagher

Bristol, New Hampshire

^  Christina Gerding

Quincy, Illinois

^  Jason Gerding

Quincy, Illinois

^  Anthime Joseph Gionet

Burbank, California

^  Simone Melissa Gold

Los Angeles, California

^  Daniel Goodwyn

San Francisco, California

^  Vaughn Gordon

Lafayette, Louisiana

^  Couy Griffin

Tularosa, New Mexico

^  Jack Jesse Griffith

Tennessee

^  Brian Gundersen

Armonk, New York

^  Peter J. Harding

Buffalo, New York

^  Andrew Hatley

South Carolina

^  Edward E. Hemenway II

Winchester, Virginia

^  Jacob Hiles

Virginia Beach, Virginia

^  Suzanne Ianni

Natick, Massachusetts

^  Kash Lee Kelly

Hammond, Indiana

^  Leo Christopher Kelly

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

^  Christopher M. Kelly

New City, New York

^  Jacob Lewis

Victorville, California

^  Kevin Loftus

Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin

^  John Lolos

^  Robert Anthony Lyon

Columbus, Ohio

^  Kevin James Lyons

Chicago, Illinois

^  Dominick Madden

New York

^  Anthony R. Mariotto

Fort Pierce, Florida

^  Felipe Marquez

Coral Springs, Florida

^  Zachary Hayes Martin

Rogersville, Missouri

^  Matthew Carl Mazzocco

San Antonio, Texas

^  Justin McAuliffe

Bellmore, New York

^  David Charles Mish Jr.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

^  Nicolas Anthony Moncada

Staten Island

^  Patrick Montgomery

Littleton, Colorado

^  Henry Phillip Muntzer

Dillon, Montana

^  Christopher W. Ortiz

Huntington, New York

^  Robert Keith Packer

Newport News, Virginia

^  Matthew Perna

Sharon, Pennsylvania

^  Rachael Lynn Pert

Middleburg, Florida

^  Tam Dinh Pham

Richmond, Texas

^  Daniel Dink Phipps

Garland, Texas

^  Christine Priola

Willoughby, Ohio

^  Blake A. Reed

Nashville, Tennessee

^  Jordan T. Revlett

Island, Kentucky

^  Jorge A. Riley

Sacramento, California

^  Jesus Rivera

Pensacola, Florida

^  Thomas Robertson

Ferrum, Virginia

^  Nicholas Rodean

Frederick, Maryland

^  Eliel Rosa

Midland, Texas

^  Bradley Rukstales

Inverness, Illinois

^  Jennifer Leigh Ryan

Frisco, Texas

^  Mark Sahady

Malden, Massachusetts

^  Diana Santos-Smith

Bucks County, Pennsylvania

^  Jon Ryan Schaffer

Columbus, Indiana

^  Kevin Seefried

Laurel, Delaware

^  Dennis Sidorski

Ashburn, Virginia

^  Mark Simon

Huntington Beach, California

^  Jeffrey Alexander Smith

San Diego, California

^  Christopher Raphael Spencer

North Carolina

^  Patrick Alonzo Stedman

Haddonfield, New Jersey

^  Melody Steele-Smith

Gloucester, Virginia

^  Michael Stepakoff

Palm Harbor, Florida

^  John Herbert Strand

Beverly Hills, California

^  Kevin Strong

Beaumont, California

^  Marissa A. Suarez

Union Beach, New Jersey

^  Douglas Sweet

Hudgins, Virginia

^  Patricia Todisco

Staten Island

^  Eric Chase Torrens

Gallatin, Tennessee

^  Israel Tutrow

Greenfield, Indiana

^  Chance Anthony Uptmore

San Antonio, Texas

^  James Herman Uptmore

San Antonio, Texas

^  Hector Emmanuel Vargas Santos

Jersey City, New Jersey

^  William Vogel

Pawling, New York

^  Joshua Wagner

Greenwood, Indiana

^  Bradley Weeks

Macclenny, Florida

^  Andrew Williams

Orlando, Florida

^  Dana Joe Winn

Middleburg, Florida

^  Andrew Wrigley

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

_______________________________

-30-

cultures, colors, characters and conditions

 

In that video of Donald Trump seeming to sing "Leaving On A Jet Plane"--at the beginning when Vice President Pence seems to be dragging him by his ankles out of the Oval Office - that made me laugh...

How would the video-maker go about finding people to portray Messrs. Trump and Pence? - watching it over again, I realized you would have to get three things approximated --

^  the body size and build, of each man;

^  the generic Capitol Hill suit in a dark color probably blue, on each of them;

and

^  the hair.

And then you shoot, not close-up, and not really showing faces...

It came out seeming realistic -- it did look like Pence was dragging him right out of there....

_______________________________

CNBC, the financial channel, ran the full text of Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem -- I didn't get to hear it, so I read it:

"The Hill We Climb"

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry.  A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace, and the norms and notions of what "just" is isn't always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that 

doesn't mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we'll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.

If we're to live up to our own time, then victory won't lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we've made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It's the past we step into and how we repair it.

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be:  a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.

Our blunders become their burdens.

But one thing is certain.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children's birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.

The new dawn balloons as we free it.

For there is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it.

If only we're brave enough to be it.

----------------------------------------------

-30-

don't know when I'll be back again

 

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

I'm standin' here outside your door

I hate to wake you up to say good-bye

But the dawn is breakin' - it's early morn

The taxi's waitin' - he's blowin' his horn

Already I'm so lonesome I could cry

So kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you'll wait for me

Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leavin' - on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go

There's so many times I've let you down

So many times I've played around

I tell you now, they don't mean a thing

Every place I go, I'll think of you

Every song I sing, I'll sing for you

When I come back, I'll wear your wedding ring

So kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you'll wait for me

Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go

Now the time has come to leave you

One more time, let me kiss you

Close your eyes, and I'll be on my way

Dream about the days to come

When I won't have to leave alone

About the times, I won't have to say --

Kiss me, and smile for me

Tell me that you'll wait for me

Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go

I'm leavin' -- on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again

Oh babe -- I hate to go

_____________________________

{"Leaving on a Jet Plane" - written by John Denver.}

     On You Tube, we can listen to this beautiful-sounding song -- I like to hear the Peter, Paul and Mary recording of it, and also the John Denver one.  

     (Mark Lindsay, a favorite singer of teens and pre-teens, recorded it too -- I think I heard his version on a friend's :45 in 5th or 6th grade, maybe...)

     Then, after familiarizing ourselves with the song (or refreshing our memories) there's a video -- meticulously filmed and masterfully edited -- with the title,

Donald Trump Sings Leaving On A Jet Plane

uploader:  Maestro Ziikos

It's funny.

And good.

...Good and funny...

-30-