With a generous-giving milk cow, a pen full of fattening hogs, and a flock of Plymouth Rock hens of high laying qualities, Blaine Sartain lives the good life apart from the hustle and worries of a main street world. [Near John’s Creek in Craig County, Virginia, 1960]
In her forward to the book, Ms. Speer writes, The first time I saw some of Earl Palmer’s photographs I was captivated. As a folklorist interested in the traditional culture of Appalachia, I was struck by Palmer’s images of the folklife of mountain people. There were photographs of farm life, mountain cabins and rail fences, quilting, basketmaking, gathering mountain herbs, boiling molasses, stirring apple butter, and making moonshine. But it was not only the subject matter that drew me to the photographs. I had seen and even made photographs of mountain folk culture many times before. I was struck by the quality of the photographs, the range of subject matter, the apparent age of some of the photographs, and the story they seemed to tell about Appalachia.
Paging through the book, I too was captivated.
Captivated by the photos sure.
But the thoughts behind the photos, behind the images, the people.
People who live the good life apart from the hustle and worries of a main street world.
tyrant character … unfit to be the ruler of a free people
Adapted from the line written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of the Independence that reads, “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
So how do we define tyrant?
The online Merriam Webster says simply: an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution.
Who would have ever thought that this country would live long enough to have the Supreme Court of the United States rule that the Office of the President of the United States was now deemed to BE an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution.
I don’t know about you but those words Mr. Jefferson wrote, that expressed the reasons for the Declaration sent a chill down my spine.
Henry Louis Mencken said back on July 26, 1920, that “As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.”
Don’t folks realize this is what 1776 was all about.
They say the courts move to establish the original intent of the founding fathers.
Can’t get much more original than the Declaration of Independence that all those Founding Fathers signed.
And they signed a statement that said that all American’s were equal, restrained by law and by constitution.
And if someone would not, could not be restrained by law and by constitution, then that person was unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Could that be more clear?
Yet …
We doing it too ourselves and over this 4th of July we should know that.
As Mr. Mencken continued, “We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
the greater the urge … the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else
What are roots and how long have we had them?
If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history?
Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons.
Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply.
Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings.
Only when agriculture came into practice—and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history—did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence.
But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it.
Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions.
In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed.
Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need.
Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.
From Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (Bantam, New York, 1962).
But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Mr. Steinbeck ends his book with this thought.
With all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other, I want to be very clear about one thing.
… it is a troubled place and a people caught in a jam. And I know that the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple. I feel that the end is not in question. It’s the means—the dreadful uncertainty of the means.
Watching, looking and waiting as each little bit of news dribbles out.
I sense the urge of need and I know that my will, my hunger is to be … somewhere else.
do you remember when the only thing to fear was fear – fear itself?
First off, for today, do you remember, when the only thing to fear was fear itself?
Reminds me of Former President Obama when commented on this other fellers effort to find Mr. Obama’s birth certificate saying, “Remember when we thought that was as crazy as it could get?“
But I digress.
Two stories, thoughts behind this Thurber drawing.
One focuses on the thought behind this caption.
Do you remember, Crosby, when the only thing to fear was fear itself?
The caption and drawing appeared in the New Yorker Magazine on October 10, 1948.
Three weeks before election day, 1948 or Truman vs. Dewey.
The caption references the 1st of 4 inaugural addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt when President Roosevelt faced down the Great Depression .
FDR’s speech writer had paraphrased Henry David Thoreau who had written the sentence, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” in his journal entry for September 7, 1851.
Now Mr. Dewey was painting a dark picture of the world with himself as the only way to fix it.
And poor Mr. Truman at the time with no one on his side.
On person wrote, “To err is Truman.”
Well sir, Truman won and the old joke was that FDR actually was elected five times.
Another joke is that when FDR died, a Republican laughed at the Democrat asking who would get to run now and the Democrat replies, oh we will dig up somebody and the Republican says, no no no, please don’t!
Such was the era when that caption was written.
The other story behind this drawing is that it is the second time the New Yorker ran the drawing.
It first appeared in the May 11, 1935 edition with the caption, “I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.”
By 1948, Thurber’s eye problems were getting worse and for the most part he was blind and couldn’t see to draw.
The editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, worried about Thurber’s finances and tried to come up with a way to reprint old Thurber drawings and pay him.
In his book on working with the editor, The Years with Ross, Thurber writes of this effort:
He began by taking my drawings as a joke, went through a phase in which he dismissed them as “a passing fancy, a fad of the English,” and ended up doing his darnedest, as my disability increased, to keep the drawings going by every kind of ingenious hook and crook. After I got so I could no longer see to draw, even with black grease crayon on large sheets of yellow paper, Ross began a campaign, recorded in a series of letters he wrote me, to reprint old drawings of mine with new captions. First he suggested reversing the old cuts, a simple mechanical maneuver; then, with the aid of others in the office who knew about such things, he experimented with taking figures or furniture out of one drawing and putting them in another, arriving at a dozen permutations of men, women, and dogs, chairs, bridge lamps, and framed pictures, upon which he must have spent hours of thought with his confederates in this conspiracy of consolation.
I did think up a few new captions for old drawings, but whatever device of recomposition was used, some readers got on to it.
In the last seven years of his life Ross wrote me dozens of letters and notes about my drawings. In one he said he had found out that the New Yorker had published three hundred and seven of my captioned drawings, of which one hundred and seventy-five had been printed in one or another of my books. He wanted to know if I would permit new captions by outsiders on those rearranged originals of mine. “There is a caption here on a sketch by an idea man,” he wrote me, “that it is thought might do for a re-used drawing of yours, as follows: (Two women talking) ‘Every time she tells a lie about me, I’m going to tell the truth about her.’ Now that I’ve got it on paper, it may not sound so hot, but it might do. The women in your drawings used to say some pretty batty things.” He wanted to pay me the full rate I had got for originals, but I said no on a project in which I would have no real creative part.
Fascinating in way.
Two captions.
One drawing.
Lots of stories.
Oh, and by the way, BOY HOWDY but do I you remember when the only thing to fear was fear itself? and “I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.”
No Haiku For You 