1.4.2021 – you are free to do

you are free to do,
free to say and free to choose
what I tell you to …

Adapted from James Thurber’s Further Fable, “The Bears and the Monkeys.”

Not sure why (oh sure) but it came to mind this morning.

Maybe it was the line, “By sparing you the burden of electing your leaders, we save you from the dangers of choice. No more secret ballots, everything open and aboveboard.”

The Bears and the Monkeys.

In a deep forest there lived many bears. They spent the winter sleeping, and the summer playing leap-bear and stealing honey and buns from nearby cottages. One day a fast-talking monkey named Glib showed up and told them that their way of life was bad for bears. “You are prisoners of pastime,” he said, “addicted to leap-bear, and slaves of honey and buns.”

The bears were impressed and frightened as Glib went on talking. “Your forebears have done this to you,” he said. Glib was so glib, glibber than the glibbest monkey they had ever seen before, that the bears believed he must know more than they knew, or than anybody else. But when he left, to tell other species what was the matter with them, the bears reverted to their fun and games and their theft of buns and honey.

Their decadence made them bright of eye, light of heart, and quick of paw, and they had a wonderful time, living as bears had always lived, until one day two of Glib’s successors appeared, named Monkey Say and Monkey Do. They were even glibber than Glib, and they brought many presents and smiled all the time. “We have come to liberate you from freedom,” they said. “This is the New Liberation, twice as good as the old, since there are two of us.”

So each bear was made to wear a collar, and the collars were linked together with chains, and Monkey Do put a ring in the lead bear’s nose, and a chain on the lead bear’s ring. “Now you are free to do what I tell you to do,” said Monkey Do.

“Now you are free to say what I want you to say,” said Monkey Say. “By sparing you the burden of electing your leaders, we save you from the dangers of choice. No more secret ballots, everything open and aboveboard.” For a long time the bears submitted to the New Liberation, and chanted the slogan the monkeys had taught them: “Why stand on your own two feet when you can stand on ours?”

Then one day they broke the chains of their new freedom and found their way back to the deep forest and began playing leap-bear again and stealing honey and buns from the nearby cottages. And their laughter and gaiety rang through the forest, and birds that had ceased singing began singing again, and all the sounds of the earth were like music.

MORAL: It is better to have the ring of freedom in your ears than in your nose.

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated by James Thurber, New York, Harpers, 1940.

12.19.2020 – what we learn next week

what we learn next week
helps understand yesterday
look to the future

Carpe Diem so it says now on coffee mugs and T-shirts.

Seize the day.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!

Seize the day, and put very little trust in the future!

Or as Scarlett O’hara says, “Tomorrow is another day.”

My training is in the field of history.

My wife’s training is in market research.

My wife takes today and projects it 6 months into the future.

I cannot comment on today until tomorrow at the earliest and am more comfortable waiting six months.

We get along famously.

Lots of sparks along the road.

But it struck me today how much the past depends on the future.

The old debate on facts and truth.

I love this quote from today’s reading, “postmodernism was a response to Marxism, not an embrace of it, and in fact has been described as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. In many ways, the defining condition of post-modernity is neoliberalism, so there is no reason for Conservatives not to embrace it. But for politicians, “postmodernism” has become one of those zombie ideas that cannot be killed by facts, no matter how many times academics explain that it does not in fact mean what they say it does.”

Yup.

For the me the keys phrase was “zombie ideas that cannot be killed by facts.”

I can easily apply that to today but what about any day.

And what are the facts?

What we know we don’t know that is to be known?

Where do we go for the facts?

All can agree that there is only one past and one present and one future.

But why did the one that happened happen.

What could have happened that may have made what did happen different.

Maybe this is all too early on a Saturday morning.

I remember an odd little story from the first atom bomb test in the desert in 1945.

There was much anxiety that after spending $2 Billion Dollars, it wouldn’t work.

According to records, physicist Enrico Fermi said maybe they had just spent $2 Billion dollars proving mankind could not make an atom bomb.

Fermi thought the money would have been well spent.

Each morning, each day, each incoming sweep of the tide (yep, live near the beach now) is a new start.

A new start to understanding what happened yesterday.

I spent the last 20 years of my life the TV news business.

Today I can barely watch it.

Much like the feller who worked in a sausage shop for 20 years and after moving on, refused to eat sausage.

The news lives on the blocks on WHO WHAT WHEN WHY and HOW.

But it runs on GET IT FIRST, GET IT FAST and BE ACCURATE (yes this comes last too often).

The first rough draft of history which is credited to The Washington Post’s owner. Phil Graham.

First into print those stories have a way of lingering around.

Look to tomorrow to understand yestarday.

How much will the narrative be changed?

I am reminded of a profile written by James Thurber of a man named Norman Kuehner, newspaper editor of the Columbus Dispatch and Thurber’s boss for several years.

It was Kuehner who taught Thurber to start his story with a wonderful, wordy introduction and a wonderful wordy conclusion.

Then take a pair of scissors and cut out the introduction and conclusion and you would have “A helluva good story.”

Thurber recounted how once he and Kuehner had an argument over a story.

Kuehner disputed the the story as Thurber wrote it and told to Thurber how he felt it happened and how the story should be written.

Thurber asked what if the competing paper, the Ohio State Journal and their version of the story proved to be true?

Thurber supported this version of the story.

“That,” said Mr. Kuehner, “would make it a Journal re-write.”

“I would give it a paragraph on page thirty.”

8.26.2020 – when coffee not work

when coffee not work
thank goodness for back up plan
those smoothies at dawn

Some mornings I don’t drink coffee so much as I pour into my stomach and wait for the caffine to kick in.

No thought for the taste, aroma or the smooth liquid brown warmth that starts my day.

Its the kick.

The kick in the head.

The kick in the head that starts me up and off past all other complaints and concerns and gets me in a place to start my day.

Some days it isn’t there in the cup.

Then what?

The back up plan.

I get up and go to work on the kitchen counter.

I work there as the coffee usually goes to work.

And on the days that I go to work and the coffee doesn’t?

Well …

On those days,

I have Ellington.

Ellington is my son who is also stuck at home and working his way through his senior year in high school.

He is starting is day.

His day starts with a fruit smoothie.

A concoction that requires about about 10 kinds of fruit, fresh or frozen, that he puts into his smoothie maker.

A smoothie maker might have been called a blender but for one slight diffference.

I am not awake.

Not fully awake anyway.

And the mornings I need a real kick to get going are not my best mornings.

Sickly.

Headachy.

Thick headed.

Slow.

Then Ellington turns on the smoothie maker.

It doesn’t turn on as much as it goes off.

It goes off like a bomb.

Like a bomb three feet from my ears.

Like a shrieking siren.

Like a shrieking siren three feet from my ears.

I have never stood next to an F-16 fighter jet when it takes off.

But I would be surprised if its louder and produces a higher pitched squeal than that smoothie maker,

It wakes me up.

It wakes up the people in the next apartment I am sure.

Maybe the whole building.

It gets me going for a lot of reasons.

In the short story, Something to Say, James Thurber writes of Elliot Vereker, “Vereker always liked to have an electric fan going while he talked and he would stick a folded newspaper into the fan so that the revolving blades scuttered against it, making,a noise like the rattle of machine gun fire. This exhilarated him and exhilarated me, too, but I suppose that it exhilarated him more than it did me.”

I know just the point Thurber was after when Ellington hits the on switch on that smoothie maker.

Except that I am sure if the sound exhilarated Ellington and exhilarated me, too, I suppose that it exhilarated ME more than it did him.

My backup plan.

It’s good to have a plan.

It gets me back up.

7.13.2020 – When I get old, I

When I get old, I
shall read Proust, was the thought – will
I see with new eyes?

I like stories about people and their books.

Maybe because I feel more at home in the world when there other people who regard books as parts of their lives instead of props.

Young Abraham Lincoln reading a borrowed copy of the Life of George Washington at night and placing in between the logs of the cabin for safe keeping.

Then it snows and water seeps in and ruins the book.

Young Abe walks 50 miles and offers to split thousands of fence rails to make up for the loss.

When he finishes the chore and reports to the owner that he is done, the owner presents him with the somewhat waterlogged copy of the book.

Paul the Apostle, writing a reminder in one of his letters to please send his coat AND don’t forget the books!

Thomas Jefferson selling his library to the US Government to establish the Library of Congress and also pay off some personal debts.

As soon as he gets the notified that the money from Congress is in the bank, Mr. Jefferson orders more books.

James Thurber getting his nerve together and going over to an ex-wfe’s house to reclaim his collected works of Henry James.

There is a marvelous video of an interview with historian Shelby Foote on YouTube.

CSpan’s Brian Lamb has Mr. Foote walk the viewer on a tour through his personal library where he did most of his work.

What surprised me is that Mr. Foote stopped at a set of the collected works of Marcel Proust.

It is a set that Mr. Foote says his mother gave him for his 17th birthday.

Mr. Foote said, “Everytime I feel the right to do it, I quit everything and re-read Proust.”

One reason he says if for the pure enjoyment.

And the other is that a writer can always learn from Proust.

I was intrigued to say the least.

Don’t much besides a few quotes from the writings of Marcel Proust.

Like Calculus and Neils Bohr’s heavy water and the Taft family of Ohio, Proust, or at least his name, is floating around in my brain like an ice berg.

Something I was aware of but didn’t know much about.

And aware that a lot more of it was below the water line if I cared to find out.

Cricket was like that and one summer I decided I would learn to understand what cricket was all about.

Now I am hooked on cricket. T20, ODI or TEST?

Mr. Foote, in the sweet Mississippi voice of his, recalls the pleasure of reading the 3000 pages.

When would I have time for Proust?

Every summer I try to read a famous classic that I have never read.

The Way of All Flesh.

Sinister Street.

War and Peace.

Last summer I hit Look Homeward Angel but got lost in the slog.

After hearing Mr. Foote I promised myself that when I got old I would read Proust.

This is the summer I turn 60.

I an thinking I have earned the right.

Stay tuned.

7.7.2020 – indifference in

indifference in
this, our democracy,
is abdication

I was thinking about Harold Ross today.

Mr. Ross was the founder-editor of the New Yorker Magazine.

The magazine gave a home to so many American writers and was the focus of so many American dreams.

Neither here nor there but I remember a conversation with Gerald Elliott, then the retired Editor of the Grand Rapids Press and he told me that he missed the Sunday Magazine, Wonderland.

When I asked why, he replied that it was the one place where local authors had a chance to get published.

I didn’t tell him how many short stories I had submitted to Wonderland but I batted 1,000 on rejections.

Anyway, Mr. Ross started up the New Yorker with the announcement that the magazine would, “Not be edited for the little old lady from Peoria.”

Much much ink has been spilled try to explain just what Mr. Ross meant by that and I will not add to it.

I will mention that one of the funniest comments EVER about the New Yorker was an aside by James Thurber in a vignette about his mother. Mr. Thurber wrote that once his Mother told him that one of her friends in Columbus, OH, “took the New Yorker to help Jamie,” but never read it.

What stuck in my head was the thought, “what are the people in Peoria thinking right now?”

Through the magic of the World Wide Web I was soon reading the Peoria Journal Star.

The headline, “Commentary: Law enforcement: Thoughts of a sanctified believer in America” caught my eye.

I am glad it did.

It is what I would call an OP-ED piece.

It was written for the Peoria Journal Star (fabulous name by the way) by Judge Joe Billy McDade (another fabulous name by the way) a senior U.S. District Judge in the Central District of Illinois for the 4th of July.

Judge Joe Billy McDade at a naturalization ceremony, Nov 15 2019 – JOURNAL STAR

Judge McDade led off with the words, “The promise of America”

And went from there.

The Judge went on, “While the promise of America has flickered and faded in dark times, it has never been extinguished. That promise is the bedrock of American values and it should be the touchstone as we confront the challenges, new and old, that plague us.“

He concluded with:

We the People are sovereign;

We the People must safeguard our rights against encroachment.

It is upon all of us to do what we can to make the promise of America a reality. Doing nothing emboldens the wrongdoer, whatever the intent; indifference in a democracy is abdication.

These thoughts are only a starting point — I do not have all the answers.

But in the difficult conversations which are occurring and ought to continue, what I can offer is this: ever in the foreground, always in view, must be the fundamental idea of America, a nation where all and the rights of all are equal under the law.

By chance today I got a point of view from Peoria.

I have been feeling mostly rotten lately about our Country.

Knowing that Judge Joe Billy McDade is out there made me feel better.

One little light.

Maybe there are more.

There must be!

But even if Judge Joe Billy McDade is the ONLY one out there, I will not abdicate from my responsibilities as a citizen of the United States.

I will not walk away.

I will not go quietly into the night.

Indifference be damned.

It’s going to be a pub fight.