11.5.2024 – build triumphal arch …

build triumphal arch …
build it out of bricks – something’
convenient to throw

Based on the line, “When ye build yer triumphal arch to yer conquering’ hero, Hennessy, build it out of bricks so the people will have something’ convenient to throw at him as he passes through,” attributed to Mr. Dooley.

Sorry but I cannot find a better citation.

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Dooley (or Martin J. Dooley) is a fictional Irish immigrant bartender created by American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Dooley was the subject of many Dunne columns between 1893 and 1915, and again in 1924 and 1926. Dunne’s essays contain the bartender’s commentary on various topics.

Also according to Wikipedia, Finley Peter Dunne (born Peter Dunne; July 10, 1867 – April 24, 1936) was an American humorist, journalist and writer from Chicago. In 1898 Dunne published Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, his first collection of the nationally syndicated Mr. Dooley sketches.[1] Written as though speaking with the thick verbiage and accent of an Irish immigrant from County Roscommon, Dunne’s fictional “Mr. Dooley” expounded upon political and social issues of the day from behind the bar of his South Side Chicago Irish pub.

I just feel like throwing bricks today.

I have also been looking for a specific snap shot of history and while looking for it, I came across this other snippet.

This is reported in the diary of John Colville, one of Winston Churchill’s private secretary.

This happened in May of 1940 just a week after Churchill took over as Prime Minister and led the showdown against Nazi Germany.

Mr. Colville writes that: Mrs Churchill who said that the preacher at St Martin-in-the-Fields had preached such a pacifist sermon that morning that she got up and left.

“You ought to have cried ‘Shame’,” said Winston, “desecrating the House of God with lies!”

I love that but that wasn’t the story I was looking for even though it fits a bit.

The story I wanted was in the Prophet of Truth.

Book V in Martin Gilbert’s multi volume biography of Mr. Churchill.

On the day Neville Chamberlin brought back the infamous Munich agreement, an agreement that allowed Germany to take over Czechoslovakia, an agreement that Mr. Chamberlin waved from his balcony, Mr Gilbert writes that:

Throughout the morning the British Government urged the Czechs to accept the ‘Munich’terms; at noon Beneš agreed to do so. That afternoon Chamberlain flew back to London. ‘Vast crowds in the streets,’ Oliver Harvey recorded in his diary, ‘hysterical cheers and enthusiasm. PM on balcony at Buckingham Palace. But many feel it to be a great humiliation.’

In an unpublished note written ten years later Churchill recalled how, that day, ‘My wife and Lord Cecil solemnly discussed marching themselves with a select band to Downing Street and hurling a brick through the windows at No 10.’

I have been thinking about bricks today.

How there are some people and some windows I would love to throw a brick through.

Instead, I voted.

And I have to say that when I fed my ballot into the machine, unlike any other time I have ever voted, I felt like I had thrown my brick.

I hope he felt it.

11.4.2024 – irrelevant? how

irrelevant? how
bad does it have to be to
be irrelevant?

I like to start my Sunday newspapers reading two sports columns in the online USA Today.

One is a column that tracks the winners and losers, those college football teams that came out as winners the previous Saturday and those college football teams that came out as losers.

My team lost and lost big to the Number One team in the nation.

Oddly though neither team made this column.

My team lost, was expected to lose and I guess as such, was not listed among the losers.

The other team, just be a loser of a team, and I guess as such, was not listed among the winners.

The other column is the College Football Misery Index.

This column tracks which college football team’s fans feel the worse.

Your team can win and you still feel lousey like last week, Ohio State beat Nebraska, but no one felt that good about it.

This week the five top teams whose fans are in Misery, all lost.

The next group of fans are listed as being Miserable but not miserable enough.

Georgia won their game but with their QB throwing 3 INT’s, their fans still feel not so great.

But here is the point.

My team didn’t make either list.

They are so awful, that there no longer even figure in the conversation of teams whose fan’s feel awful.

My team had a very good year last year.

I should be able to manage a bad year this year.

But who planned on being … irrelevant.

My team has been here before.

We hired this feller known as the Morgantown Miracle Worker as head coach and he was reverse Amish.

He did less with more than almost any coach known in the history of the game.

My team didn’t lose often, at least until Rich Rod came along.

He even lost to the University of Toledo.

Lost to Toledo and then an odd thing happened.

Toledo had a bad season, beat my team but had a bad season.

Almost any other time in history, any team from the state of Ohio that beat my team was a reason to give the coach a better contract.

This year though was different.

Beating my team didn’t matter and that Toledo coach got fired.

My team was irrelevant to the conversation that season..

Much like my team was this past weekend.

Winner?

Loser?

In Misery?

In the wrap up conversation about the weekend of football, my team had again become, irrelevant.

Are we back in those bad old days so soon?

Oh well, there was always last year.

11.3.2024 – that time of year when

that time of year when
yellow leaves, none or few, hang
shake against the cold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet 73 by William Shakespear, 1609.

According to Wikipedia, Sonnet 73 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the rhyme scheme of the English sonnet form, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. It is composed in iambic pentameter, a poetic metre that has five feet per line, and each foot has two syllables accented weak then strong. Almost all of the lines follow this without variation.

The organization of the poem serves many roles in the overall effectiveness of the poem. Yet, one of the major roles implied by this scheme revolves around ending each quatrain with a complete phrase. Given the rhyme scheme of every other line within the quatrain, as an audience we are to infer a statement is being made by the end of every four lines. Further, when shifted toward the next four lines, a shift in the overall thought process is being made by the author.

While I find the commentary fascinating, I have to admit I really don’t know what it means.

What I do know is I like the flow – the sounds – the thoughts and the idea that fall in 1609 England and the feelings that fall might bring aren’t too far from thoughts and feelings today.

Like a review I came across of a new biography of a much chronicled John Adams and the reviewer … nothing new here … but arranged and presented in a nice way.

As for how to read Shakespeare … have you seen this clip on the proper way to say, To Be of Not to be from Hamlet?

11.2.2024 – he knew no jury

he knew no jury
darken honest man’s future
with unjust verdict

When the charge of election bribery was brought against an Illinois senator, he replied, “I read the Bible and believe it from cover to cover”

When his accusers specified five hundred dollars of corruption money was paid in a St Louis hotel bathroom, his friends answered, “He is faithful to his wife and always kind to his children”

When he was ousted from the national senate and the doors of his bank were closed by government receivers and a grand jury indicted him, he took the vows of an old established church

When a jury acquitted him of guilt as a bank wrecker, following the testimony of prominent citizens that he was an honest man, he issued a statement to the public for the newspapers, proclaiming he knew beforehand no jury would darken the future of an honest man with an unjust verdict

Implications by as printed in Good morning, America, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1928.

Mr. Sandburg titled this poem, Implications.

The online Oxford Dictionary defines implications as “the conclusion that can be drawn from something although it is not explicitly stated.”

Mr. Sandburg published his poem, Implications, back in 1928.

I am startled not by the implications, the laundry list of wrongs or implied wrongs, that has been going on forever.

But that the Senator in question was backed and continued to be backed, regardless or in spite of evidence to the contrary, by ‘prominent citizens‘ and the Senator’s self assurance in his knowledge beforehand that the jury would be swayed by the testimony of the ‘prominent citizens.’

You could bet cash money this poem had been written yesterday, not 100 years ago.

Who needs social media?

Who needs influencers?

PS: 3 days out of the last 4, I have turned to Mr. Sandburg. If he were alive today, he wouldn’t stop throwing up.

11.1.2024 – will pick up the shards

will pick up the shards
of a ruined society and
slowly help rebuild

Back in 1947, The Berkshire Eagle from Pittsfield, Massachusetts printed this little note:

Professor Albert Einstein was asked by friends at a recent dinner party what new weapons might be employed in World War III. Appalled at the implications, he shook his head.

After several minutes of meditation, he said. “I don’t know what weapons might be used in World War III. But there isn’t any doubt what weapons will be used in World War IV.”

“And what are those?” a guest asked.

“Stone spears,” said Einstein.

This has come down to us through history as Dr. Einstein saying, “I can’t tell you what weapons will be used in World War 3. But I can you what weapons will be used in World War 4. Sticks and Stones.“

Any body doubt this?

In 2014, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as the church has done so often in human history.”

Cardinal George said that, “I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring.”

That was 11 years ago.

IN 2025, I think our current and former Presidents can expect to die in bed.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the next President dies in prison.

And I almost expect that the successor to the next President, and I am talking about the one elected in 2028 or possibly 2032, will die a martyr in the public square.

The country as we know it is bitterly and I mean BITTERLY divided.

The country is about 92.6% armed with guns.

Nobody trusts nobody and I cannot begin to understand who it is that half the of the country listens to that they don’t hear what is being said or somehow can accept and agree with what is being said.

On the one hand an ignorant and arrogant government, and on the other hand a gang of ignorant and arrogant hoodlums — so often the voters must choose between these two,” said a desperate registered voter in Philadelphia … so wrote Carl Sandburg in The People, Yes.

It won’t end pretty but it sure feels like it is all coming to an end.

It was a pretty good run and maybe this all lasted longer than anyone thought it would.

I guess when you get down to it, it was all pretty much a hypocrisy with all the all created equal stuff.

But it was, while it lasted, a useful hypocrisy.

Maybe that’s what this is all about.

I thought some inroads had been made in society on the basis of race but it was just a band aid and the band aid and scab got ripped off.

I thought some inroads had been made in society on the basis of equality but it was just a band aid and the band aid and scab got ripped off.

I thought some inroads had been made in society on the basis of love but it was just a band aid and the band aid and scab got ripped off.

I thought some inroads had been made in church along all these lines but it was just a band aid and the band aid and scab got ripped off.

The band aids and scabs got ripped off and the hypocrisy was exposed to the dismay of some and the cheers of others in a way I cannot understand.

And then?

To paraphrase Cardinal George, our successors will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as has been done so often in human history.

We started in 1787 to make a More Perfect Union and got this far before those in the Country who needed to tear up the Declaration and Constitution got their chance.

Maybe next time.