8.24.2023 – as often the case …

as often the case …
crash probably exactly
what appeared to be

For some reason when I first saw the NYT opinion piece headline, Plane crash was probably exactly what it appeared to be (By Serge Schmemann, New York Time, Aug. 24, 2023), I thought I was going to read an expert’s opinion that when the plane that had Yevgeny Prigozhin listed as a passenger crashed, it was just one of those things.

Bad things can happen to bad people.

Lots of people have been killed in plane crashes.

Knute Rockne, Head Football Coach ‘win one for the gipper’ at Notre Dame, for one.

I never once met Mr. Rockne as his plane crashed in 1931, but I when I was a kid I saw a biographical film of Mr. Rockne and when the story came for the plane to crash, the movie showed a farmer out plowing his field and looking up in the sky, saw the plane crash.

The farmer then bowed his head and removed his hat.

I don’t know how old I was, 3rd or 4th grade, but it was 20 years before I realized that that piece of the movie was just some stock footage, not an actual record of the Rockne crash.

Still, as a kid, I felt I had witnessed something and I long felt a certain attachment and sadness about Mr. Rockne.

At least until Michigan renewed their contract with Notre Dame and started playing them again in 1978.

Prior to that Michigan and Notre Dame hadn’t played since 1947 for many reasons.

By chance, as student doing research on Michigan Football, I was able to get an interview with then Michigan Athletic Director Dan Canham.

During the course of the interview I asked if it was true Michigan wouldn’t play Notre Dame because Fritz Crisler didn’t like Catholics and didn’t like Rockne.

“Oh No,” said Canham, “It had nothing to do with that. Crisler felt cheated over the 1947 National Champion vote … It was Yost who hated Rockne.”

BUT I DIGRESS.

The topic was plane crashes.

So I clicked on the headline and I read:

As is so often the case with atrocities in Mr. Putin’s Russia, the plane crash was probably exactly what it appeared to be: the assassination of a nettlesome rival by the ruthless ruler.

Wow!

Such a matter-of-fact, cold blooded use of simple words.

What else could have happened?

Not much room here to wiggle or discuss.

The plane crash was probably exactly what it appeared to be: the assassination of a nettlesome rival by the ruthless ruler.

Mr. Schmemann closes with:

The need to enforce personal loyalty has become even more critical with the invasion of Ukraine, an operation linked directly to Mr. Putin that is amassing a terrible cost in lives, treasure and international standing.

Given Mr. Prigozhin’s sordid history, it remains possible that new and perhaps surprising revelations about this crash still lie ahead. But if it turns out that this was not Mr. Putin’s doing, it may only be because someone beat him to it.

Our democratic process is screwed up.

And we have really trod hard on it with seven league boots of late.

But it does have its advantages.

We had 8 contenders to high office on TV last.

I bet all 8 flew home safely.

Maybe that’s why a certain someone with a appointment today in downtown ATL likes Mr. Putin so much.

But this certain someone himself will fly in and out of ATL without any concern.

I have to admit I tried to reach out to this certain someone today.

I know of several Fulton County Bail Bond locations and I can personally recommend Bond James Bond.

8.23.2023 – Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker
said there is no Gertrude Stein?
terrible thing to say

Dialogue from the book, Unstrung heroes : my improbable life with four impossible uncles by Franz Lidz, (Signet, New York, NY, 1995).

“There, there, Sidney,” said Shirley.

“Dorothy Parker said there is no there there,” he said.

“I believe it was Gertrude Stein,” she said.

“You mean Dorothy Parker said there is no Gertrude Stein?” I said helpfully.

“That’s a terrible thing for her to say,” said Uncle Danny.

This is here just because when I read it, I laughed out loud.

Being of Dutch heritage, it takes a lot to make me laugh out loud.

I don’t mean that I don’t laugh, it’s that I laugh like I was raised Dutch because I was raised Dutch.

I had a conversation once with a my very Dutch (a Not-Dutch? Not-Much! feller) brother in law in church as we watched a visiting Preacher get more and more frustrated as he told funny illustration after funny illustration and not get one snicker from the congregation.

I told my brother in law we needed to leave a note in the pulpit that if the people are smiling, most other audiences would be laughing.

If people were smiling and nodding, that was equal to continued, loud laughter.

If some folks smiled, nodded and held out one hand and dropped it down to soundlessly slap a knee, well, that was just about over the top, rolling on the floor, laughing.

But we were Dutch.

I wanted a quote from the movie Unstrung Hero’s and I hoped I might find in the book of the same name.

Sorry to say, I could not find the quote I was after but I did come across this bit of writing and it made me laugh.

The words.

The pacing of the conversation.

The subjects.

It was just funny.

That, for any Dutch person, is reason to write down and share the experience.

8.22.2023 -palingenetic

palingenetic
ultranationalistic age
meet the enemy …

In the book, The Winds of War, Rhoda Henry is in Berlin and sees all the Third Reich icons and says to her husband Pug,

“What on earth does NSDAP stand for?” Rhoda said, peering out of the window of the embassy car at the multitudinous gilded poles.
“National Socialist German Workers Party,” said Pug.
“Is that the name of the Nazis? How funny. Sounds sort of Commie when you spell it all out.”

I like words and I write this blog to recognize unique word usage but when I ran across palingenetic ultranationalistic this morning in the article, US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network by Jason Wilson (The Guardian, 8/22/2023) I had to stop and say, “What on Earth is palingenetic ultranationalistic.”

According to Wikipedia, palingenetic ultranationalistic is the effort .. to attract large masses of voters who have lost their faith in traditional politics and religion by promising them a brighter future.

The palingenetic myth can also possibly stand for a return to a golden age in the country’s history so that the past can be a guidebook to a better tomorrow.

… there will be one great leader who battles the representatives of the old system with grassroots support. It appears as one mass of people with only one goal: to create their new future. They have infinite faith in their mythical hero as he stands for everything they believe in. With him, the country will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of corruption and decadence.

Sounds sort of Commie when you spell it out.

North Korean type Commie.

Joseph Stalin kind of Commie.

But it seems to the be the basis for a secretive, men-only, invitation-only far-right network here in America.

Still sounds sort of Commie when you spell it out.

Not that spelling it out helped me too much.

Wikipedia tries to help explain by using palingenetic ultranationalistic in a sentence.

National-anarchism has been argued to be a syncretic political ideology that was developed in the 1990s by former Third Positionists to promote a “stateless palingenetic ultranationalism”.

Have to say I haven’t seen so many poly syllabic words is so short a sentence in a long time.

I did notice that according to the article this far right network is a registered non profit under section 501(c)(10) of the Internal Revenue code.

Jim Harrison once wrote something along the lines of if you really want to take a stand and protest against the government, stop paying your taxes.

So I feel a little less threatened that these folks are concerned about their non-profit status.

Or should I feel more threatened?

Kind of like Tony Soprano hustling around to get his W2 ready.

Never the less, the article was chilling and the comments about warlords and maximum leaders brought to mind Mr. Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984.

” … on the face of the coin [was] the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

Who are these people?

Where did this people come from?

As Pogo said back over 50 years ago, we have met the enemy and they are us.

8.21.2023 – thinking of death but

thinking of death but
dressing it in the raiment
lyric, metaphor

Most of the people I like, or love, or can barely stand are between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, give or take a year or two at either end, and only about three of them are capable any longer of achieving what was once casually called, and is now wistfully called, a good night’s rest.

For ours is the age of the four “A”s: anxiety, apprehension, agonizing, and aspirin.

People are smoking more and enjoying it less, drinking more and feeling it more, and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the mushroom-shaped ceiling, listening for the approaching drone of enemy bombers, and thinking of death but dressing it in the raiment of lyric or metaphor: the gate in the garden wall, the putting out to sea, the mother of beauty, the fog in the throat, the ruffian on the stair, the man in the white coat, the sleep that rounds our little lives.

From The Watchers of the Night in Lanterns & Lances by James Thurber.

For ours is the age of the four “A”s:

Anxiety,

Apprehension,

Agonizing,

and Aspirin.

Change Aspirin to Advil and change mushroom-shaped ceiling to and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the ceiling fan and counting the blades as they go around and you got me, nearly 70 years after Thurber wrote these lines.

I agonize about my apprehension over my anxiety so I take an Advil.

Then though, reading this, I seem to be right on schedule.

One less thing to agonize over.

One thing to feel apprehension over.

One less thing to fuel my anxiety.

One less Advil to take.

I am right on schedule!

8.20.2023 – when Carl Sandburg sings

when Carl Sandburg sings
I know a lover of all
the living sings then

In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes writes about his time a Cleveland Central High School:

Ethel Weimer discovered Carl Sandburg for me. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before—in an article, I think, in the Kansas City Star about how bad free verse was—I didn’t really know him until Miss Weimer in second-year English brought him, as well as Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, to us. Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg.

Little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s and poems without rhyme like Sandburg’s were the first real poems I tried to write. I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my step-father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day.

… about Carl Sandburg, my guiding star, I wrote:

Carl Sandburg’s poems
Fall on the white pages of his books
Like blood-clots of song
From the wounds of humanity.
I know a lover of life sings
When Carl Sandburg sings.
I know a lover of all the living
Sings then