Captain! My Captain!
My Captain does not answer.
Fallen cold and dead.

Abraham Lincoln

February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865

O Captain! My Captain!
BY WALT WHITMAN

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Source: Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891)

Walt Whitman composed the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. The poem is classified as an elegy or mourning poem, and was written to honor Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. Walt Whitman was born in 1819 and died in 1892, and the American Civil War was the central event of his life. Whitman was a staunch Unionist during the Civil War. He was initially indifferent to Lincoln, but as the war pressed on, Whitman came to love the president, though the two men never met.

“O Captain! My Captain!” became one of Whitman’s most famous poems, one that he would read at the end of his famous lecture about the Lincoln assassination. Whitman became so identified with the poem that late in life he remarked, “Damn My Captain…I’m almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.” (Wikipedia)

They are everywhere
here, there, voting, taking charge
beware … the kidults

I saw this for the first time in print this morning in the Guardian in a headline about Coachella. I don’t know much about Coachella or Burning Man but when I saw the word, kidult, I focused mentally for about 10 minutes on the word.

First I thought how perfect it was.

Then, how scary.

Described so much about I see at work, online, on TV and in life.

I googled the word and learned it had first been used in 2009 and again in 2013.

I think its too good a word to not join the front rank of generational adjectives of Y2K, GENX and Baby Boomer.

Kidults. Truly terrifying.

But does this happen to each generation?

Hippies scared the heck out of my parents I am sure.

music was story
story whatever the song
don’t know what it means

From Skateaway by Dire Straits

I seen a girl on a one way corridor
Stealing down a wrong way street
For all the world like an urban toreador
She had wheels on on her feet
Well the cars do the usual dances
Same old cruise and the kerbside crawl
But the roller girl she’s taking chances
They just love to see her take them all
No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud
Hallelujah here she comes queen roller ball
Enchante what can I say don’t care at all
You know she used to have to wait around
She used to be the lonely one
But now that she can skate around town
She’s the only one
No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud
She gets rock n roll a rock n roll station
And a rock n roll dream
She’s making movies on location
She don’t know what it means
But the music make her want to be the story
And the story was whatever was the song what it was
Roller girl don’t worry
D.j. play the movies all night long
She tortures taxi drivers just for fun
She like to read their lips
Says toro toro taxi see ya tomorrow my son
I swear she let a big truck grease her hip
She got her own world in the city
You can’t intrude on her
She got her own world in the city
’cause the city’s benn so rude to her
No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud
She gets rock n roll a rock n roll station
And a rock n roll dream
She’s making movies on location
She don’t know what it means
But the music make her want to be the story
And the story was whatever was the song what it was
Roller girl don’t worry
D.j. play the movies all night long
Come slipping and sliding
Life’s roller ball
Slipping and a sliding
Skate away that’s all
Shala shalay hey hey skate away
She’s going singing shala shalay hey hey
Skate away
Songwriters: Mark Knopfler
Skateaway lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Privacy declines
Change is price of survival
High priced future

Based on the Churchill quote of “Change is the price of survival.”

While I will attribute that saying to him, I have been searching the WWW and I am not finding anything but the quote and not a source that puts the quote in context.

I am not sure that Mr. Churchill is not referring to changing into warm clothes when exploring Antarctica.

Churchill is also reported to have said, or at least quoted someone else, that “To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.”

To both of these I respond “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” or, “the more you change, the more you stay the same”.

Life is all one step forward, two steps back, lessons of history are ignored and history is repeated and all writing is autobiographical.

But the recent change in privacy and the lack of privacy has a different feel. Cameras watching everywhere. Microphones listening everywhere. Drones, phones and smart watches fill our existence.

It is 1984 come to life and we are happily spending the big bucks to enable and empower the monolithic steam roller of being ‘connected’ that is flattening every bulwark we have to protect our private lives.

When I first read 1984 and the passage where Winston Smith has to get up and exercise in front of his view screen, along with everyone else in the world, and the on-screen instructor yells at Smith to pick up the pace, what I thought was, “OH SUREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Today, this very scene is including in commercials for work out equipment and it is billed as a must-have-plus to owning and using the equipment.

Mr. Lenin said something like, “When the time comes to hang the western world, a capitalist will sell me the rope.”

If told that their privacy would be taken from them, most people in this Country would follow tradition and raise the ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ flags and gather with rifles on the village green.

But offer to buy the phone, watch, camera or audio assistant that will manage the problems of your life for you, and we pay to give our privacy away.

Have we gone nuts?