sweet talk 'em and drink their bourbon

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden going back and forth about -- busing (??) ... is kind of like a time warp ... (What year is it?  How did I get here?  South Boston? -- What??)

On Hardball, Chris Matthews seemed to understand Biden's comments as alluding to -- two things:

1.  the history, progress, and change he (Biden) has lived and worked through, as a public servant, and

2.  how -- you had those people -- segregationists from the South -- in the Senate back then and you had to find a way to deal with them.

     Chris Matthews refers to them as "seggies" -- the same way people say "aggies" as slang for agricultural students, or schools.

     He says in his inimitable way, "You had to find a way to work with them, because you needed the votes!  You had to get along -- you had to sweet talk them and drink their bourbon..."


     That line reminded me of Lyndon Johnson:
----------------- [excerpt] ----------- New York Times columnist Russell Baker remembers Johnson...
"...He was a character out of a Russian novel, one of those human complications that filled the imagination of Dostoyevsky, a storm of warring human instincts:  

sinner and saint, buffoon and statesman, cynic and sentimentalist, a man torn between hungers for immortality and self-destruction."


     Johnson, another journalist says, was more complex than any Manichaean picture of him can convey.  He was not a case of good and evil living side by side but of "an unlovable man desperate to be loved, whose cynicism and idealism were mysteriously inseparable, all of a piece."  

This journalist quotes Robert Penn Warren's observation in All the King's Men:  "A man's virtue may be the defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue."  Lyndon Johnson was a study in ambiguity. ------------------------------------- [end, excerpt - Introduction / Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek's biography of Johnson]

     I don't know about all of that, but I can imagine back in the day, if there was a deal to be made, LBJ would give as good as he got with the sweet-talk, and he would bring the bourbon....

-30-

if you're down on your luck, and you can't harmonize

Sunday night at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, Mick Jagger said he hoped everyone had a great July 4th weekend -- 

and added that the Fourth had always been a "touchy holiday for us Brits.  In fact, the President made a very good point in his speech the other night -- he said, if only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us."


----------- Now, that's deadpan.

                     Nobody does it like the English.

-30-

it's so hard to keep this smile from my face

     It's interesting how words change their meanings in the English language -- and probably all languages.  Over time, the way people use a particular word can evolve.

     There were scrapbooks in the world before "scrapbooking" became a "thing" in the early 2000s.  But when that wave of super-popularity hit, the word began to be used as a verb as well as a noun.

Noun:  "Here is my scrapbook."

Conjugated as a verb:
Today I scrapbook.
Yesterday I scrapbooked.
Tomorrow I will have been scrapbooking.


     ("You want to vent?  You want to scrapbook?  You want to get revenge?")

----------------------- (How do these trends happen?  In the 2000s, scrapbooking.  In the '90s -- jet skis...Is it just whatever they tell us to buy...?)


     The Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" seemed at first to have two themes:

1.  Older folks are people, too.  And
2.  Some folks are gay.

     
     There are other aspects of life besides those two that the show touches on:  for example, the ubiquitous presence of technology in modern life -- the people in that show are always texting and using social media and being ring-toned-at by their phones.

They also mention the need to unplug sometimes -- Jane Fonda's character says in one episode, "I just want to have a martini and watch that show where terrible people buy tiny houses."


     One of this show's creators is Marta Kauffman, who also was a creator and executive producer of "Friends."

     As intro music to "Grace and Frankie" they sometimes use a popular Seventies song, "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealers Wheel.

Yeah, I don't know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain't right
I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair
And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...

-30-

using "scrapbook" as a verb

     On Netflix, I discovered a show called "Grace and Frankie."  

     I had read about it when it was first on, but I didn't have internet or netflix etc., and so had never seen it.

     As I listened to the dialogue early in Season 1 -- when the guy comfortingly asks the shocked, heartbroken, furious wife, "You want to vent?  You want to scrapbook?  You want to get revenge?" ...

-30-

oh the fishes will laugh

a poem for July



As clouds gather and darken and hover,
Is it impending doom they're predicting
Or merely a dash of summer rain
From summer-Spain,
Staying mainly in the plain?


Politicians leap-frogging for cover
Panning for gold in poison-choked streams
Cuyahoga River too hot to handle
Lit on fire by some criminal vandal
Sipping Greed Tea, smiling for scandal


Sea to shining sea, glass lover
Sweet smell of corruption, overdose of attention
Sort of makes them wonder,
What kind of spell they're under
Stare silently as snake-eyed plunder

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

-30-

Albert Lee & The Refreshments

...Right, never let it be said that the Rolling Stones don't understand country music.  Clearly it's woven right into the fabric of their oeuvre. ...

"Far Away Eyes"
"Dead Flowers"
"Sweet Virginia"
"Dear Doctor"
"You Win Again"...

________________________________________

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America


     When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- 

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- 

That whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies....

_______________________
________________________

And now, for the Third in the "Triple" of Fourth-of-July holiday songs from this blog,

type in on You Tube:

Albert Lee & The Refreshments - I'm Ready


and    Play

-30-

have mercy, have strength

On this, the second day of our 4th Of July triple, go on YouTube and type in 

The Rolling Stones, Far Away Eyes


and

Play.

...well, I was so pleased to be informed of this, that I ran twenty red lights in His honor... 

-30-