words meant more before explosion of cinema and television
Adapted from the passage:
“He moves through the work of war poets, novelists and memoirists such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. Words meant more back then, before the explosion of cinema and television. Indeed, Fussell writes, ‘Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.'”
In the article, This Book on World War I Changed How I Think of Nonfiction with the tag line, Paul Fussell’s 50-year-old survey of trench warfare deserves a new generation of readers, by Dwight Garner in the New York Times on Feb. 13, 2025.
I have to love that.
Words meant more back then, before the explosion of cinema and television.
be different from other people – easy … being different
Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different.
So writes Carl Sandburg in his poem, “A Father To His Son.”
It was Dale Carnegie, a man who knew how to win friends, who said, “If you want to be interesting, be interested.”
My Dad was interested in everything.
If that made him a little different, then it was natural and easy for him to be different.
He bought books by the armload and filled our house with books.
He bought records and made tape recordings of music and filled our house with music.
He bought stereo record players and speakers by the boxful and wired up speakers around the house and filled our house with sound.
He bought art by the square yard and covered the walls of our house with original paintings and prints of his favorite Andrew Wyeth.
He wrote in a letter home during World War 2 to his future wife that he ‘liked to live in the WHOLE house,’ no rooms just for show and that is how he lived.
My Dad was interested in everything and to me it made him different from other people.
It was a difference that came natural and easy to Dad.
And for me, he encouraged me to be interested and by extension, different.
(In that respect, he succeeded beyond any dreams.)
But, he didn’t push his interests on me.
He made interesting things available and if I showed interest, he would encourage that interest.
Dad liked historical venues.
He wanted to see them, so we got to see them.
He wanted to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan.
So we got to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan.
Dad wanted to pose us on a display of the BIG WHEELS used to cart giant White Pines to the lumber yard.
So we posed on the BIG WHEELS as a family.
Some years later, when we were all a little older, Dad thought that a visit to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan would be a nice summer day trip.
So we all went to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan for a nice summer day trip.
Dad wanted us to pose on the BIG WHEELS.
Notice, this year, Dad is in the picture.
This year, I had shown some in interest in photography.
Dad encouraged my interest.
I had my own camera, a little Kodak.
Dad had his Nikon.
I wanted to use the Nikon.
Dad let me, and I took this family picture on the BIG WHEELS.
I got to use the Nikon.
Dad trusted me.
Though my brothers and sisters look a little bit of the oh-brother-brother-mike-again, I don’t think Dad minded too much.
Even when the picture came back from the lab and it was evident that I need to work on my focus skills.
He would have found that interesting.
Happy birthday to my Dad.
105 today!
Here is the complete poem by Mr. Sandburg.
A Father To His Son
A father sees his son nearing manhood. What shall he tell that son? “Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.” And this might stand him for the storms and serve him for humdrum monotony and guide him among sudden betrayals and tighten him for slack moments. “Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.” And this too might serve him. Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed. The growth of a frail flower in a path up has sometimes shattered and split a rock. A tough will counts. So does desire. So does a rich soft wanting. Without rich wanting nothing arrives. Tell him too much money has killed men and left them dead years before burial: the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs has twisted good enough men sometimes into dry thwarted worms. Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted. Tell him to be a fool every so often and to have no shame over having been a fool yet learning something out of every folly hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies thus arriving at intimate understanding of a world numbering many fools. Tell him to be alone often and get at himself and above all tell himself no lies about himself whatever the white lies and protective fronts he may use against other people. Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.
Carl Sandburg, in The People Yes as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1950.
enough a fool or coward will file but never going to be me
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
From the resignation letter of Hagan Scotten, Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The New York Times reports that “Mr. Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and earned two Bronze Stars. He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Brett M. Kavanaugh before he, too, became an Supreme Court justice.
A Southern District spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Scotten’s resignation.”
PORTRAIT OF A COWARD
As Huck Finn said, “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”
we are doing this for people that cannot speak show up, support us
Adapted from the paragraph:
“We are doing this for the people that cannot speak, … we’re carrying the torch for people that feel like their rights are being violated,” said Bucardo, who ideally hopes the event “would stay peaceful and respectful, and our whole community, not just Hispanics, people from different backgrounds, places, show up and support us.”
In the article, Immigration reform protest planed for Feb. 17, by Mike McCombs in The Island News on Feb 12, 2025.
Remember those days when this, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door” used to mean something?
Something that made us proud.
I read the other day that one of the most maddening aspects of those who embrace Trumpism is that those folks, deep down, know better.
What do these folks think when they read, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
What do these folks think at night?
As Mr. F.S. Fitzgerald said, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as Red, White, and Blueland
119TH CONGRESS 1ST SESSION H. R. ll IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Mr. CARTER of Georgia introduced the following bill;
To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as ‘‘Red, White, and Blueland’’.
Today is Mr. Lincoln’s birthday.
The 16th President of the United States.
The man who said in his 2nd Inaugural Address:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Today, bills are introduced in the House of Representatives that would authorize the President of the United States to buy Greenland and rename it, Red, White and Blueland.
As Mr. Twain said, “Suppose I was crazy and suppose I ran for Congress. Wait, I repeat myself.“
Where did these people come from?
Who elected them?
As Mr. Mencken said or close to it, American’s get the government they deserve.
