This and that IV

“The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. I would fight for the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. I must fight against any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”
― John Steinbeck

  “Individualism attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private association are denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves.
“The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated by or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does individualism prepare the way for its opposite.”
― Robert H. Bork

  I was in line for something the other day and began chatting with the man in front of me.  It turned out he was an English visitor. During the course of our conversation he said, "I've been to Los Angeles and San Francisco, but I've never been to California."  I was about to gently correct him when I realized that he wasn't really wrong.

“Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment, et al.…delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different.”
― Robert H. Bork

When I was an undergrad, I applied for all sorts of jobs to keep me in folding money.  At one, I had what I thought was a successful interview and the interviewers -- there were two -- seemed to like me personally.  But as I left their office and began walking down the hall I heard one of them say to the other, "So, are we going to hire the corn pone?"  And they both laughed. 

When I was attending a DoDEA high school (I later transferred to a civilian magnet school), I was a cheer leader and one of our cheers to razz the opposing teams was:  "Cornbread!  Chicken! Rice! Peas! We got higher SATs!"  Heh.  But I guess it's an obsolete chant now.  Soon nobody will even know what an SAT score was.

“To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It bemuses me how often on-line commenters quarrel with and insult each other.  But it can be eye-opening.  You really get a picture of how people think and what they believe with no social Styrofoam cushioning their interactions. 
The other day one commenter put down another who had often referred to his days in the military by saying that he had voluntarily served the globohomo empire and now had PTSD as a result.  That bothered me on a number of levels. 
First, the guy who was always mentioning his days serving Uncle Sam and keeping America safe I was skeptical of because I know lots of veterans and active duty and not one -- I repeat: not one -- has ever said anything flag-wavingly patriotic.  I could sum up their attitude by what one former Marine said once:  "You know what I learned from my deployments?  I learned how to say with real sincerity, 'Fuck this shit!'"  That rings true. 
Second, I don't know and can't imagine anybody enlisting in order to serve "the globohomo empire," whatever that is.  People join up for personal reasons:  because a relative you look up to did, you want to learn a trade or get financial aid for college, you want to get away from home or the crummy town you live in, you are bored, sick of going to school and need a break, or some very personal reason that you are not about to tell anyone.
And third, PTSD is not something to be made light of.  Sure, sure, some people fake it, and some people who have no clue what real PTSD is like claim to have it for all sorts of trivial reasons.  But PTSD is real and it is caused by physical damage to the brain that can only be discerned by examining brain tissue under a microscope post-mortum.  Sometimes not even then, depending on what caused the PTSD.  To trivialize the condition or imply someone has it for the views they express on some stupid on-line blog post comment section is contemptible.

“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.”
― Thucydides

History is full of obscure zigs and zags, seemingly minor events that turn out to be major turning points in history.  Often they are never widely known, and usually only blundered across by detail-oriented history buffs.  An example:
 One result of President Franklin Roosevelt ignoring his new vice president Harry Truman and keeping his plans limited to only those whom he believed it essential to keep informed was, in retrospect, probably a catastrophic misunderstanding.
At the end of March, 1945, Roosevelt was unhappy with Churchill and
bitterly disappointed with Stalin; in fact, it seems he was furious with Stalin. Both men had acted high-handedly toward Roosevelt and the US, as if they were on the same economic level with America when both were actually essentially bankrupt and would need US economic aid even after the war with Germany was concluded.
Roosevelt asked Leo Crowley, Administrator of Foreign Aid, how much Lend-Lease had been provided to Britain and the Soviet Union. Crowley told him. Roosevelt then discussed Henry Morgenthau's proposal to lend the Soviets $10 billion more for reconstruction purposes. He remarked that he had gotten nothing from Stalin but lies and Churchill was acting as if he were Roosevelt's boss and America was a mere appendage of the still-mighty British Empire. Then he told Crowley, "I do not want you to let out any more long-term contracts on Lend-Lease. Further, I want you to shut off Lend-Lease the moment Germany is defeated. Don't wait for any further orders. Just cut it off the day Germany surrenders."
James F. Byrnes, Director of War Mobilization, was also informed of Roosevelt's wishes.
Neither knew that at the Yalta conference Stalin only agreed to attack Japan if Lend-Lease was continued into the post-war years.  So maybe Roosevelt had had second thoughts about involving the Soviet Union in the war against Japan, possibly because of progress in the development of the atomic bomb.
What Roosevelt was thinking we will never know, but when, just 10 days later, Sen. Taft (R-OH) introduced an amended bill ending Lend-Lease when Germany surrendered, and 34 Republicans, 4 Democrats and 1 Progressive voted for it and 37 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against it, creating a 39-39 tie, Vice-President Harry Truman jumped to his feet and shouted, "The chair votes no!" breaking the tie and
continuing Lend-Lease. Truman thought he was doing what the president wanted.
Roosevelt died within days, and by the time Germany surrendered, there was a new administration in the White House.
Had Roosevelt briefed Truman on the situation with Stalin and the Soviet Union as well as Churchill and Britain, the months and years after his death might have been very much different. As it was, Truman was left to learn the dog-eat-dog world of international politics on his own.

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
― William Francis Butler

This and That III

 Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
-- Walt Whitman

 Lecherous profs have been around forever.  Most often they are in the liberal arts, the tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, blue jeans and loafers type.  
I was not an English lit major but once  an English lit prof overheard 19-year-old me yakking about how I enjoyed reading Henry Miller and liked Charles Bukowski's and Kenneth Rexroth's poetry.
Pow! He was on me like white on rice, or, since he was black, um...hmm...well, like some appropriate  comparison that will come to me later.
That guy tried every which way to seduce me.  Along with my literary interests I played the piano and through my enthusiasm for Maurice Ravel had developed an interest in Les Apaches and especially the pianist Ricardo Viñes, so this guy tried to snow me by pontificating about the music of that era, though it was immediately clear to me that he knew nothing about it.
One time he said he was having a soirée at his home with a number of students and faculty and invited me to attend.  Suspecting nothing, I went only to discover I was the only one there. Ushering me into his parlor wearing a bathrobe and slippers, he said the others were just running late....
Aaaand the rest of the story shall remain untold. Unless you buy me a drink.  Um...better make it two.... 
Okay, okay, save your drinks, they would only make me barf anyway.  Nothing happened.  As my dad would say, I may have been born at night, but I was not born last night, so I got the picture right away, about faced and marched right out of there.

Speaking of Ravel, there's a well know anecdote recounting that when George Gershwin asked Ravel to give him composing lessons, Ravel said, “Why become a second-rate Ravel when you’re a first-rate Gershwin?”
Many have considered that a put-down by Ravel, which it was not at all.  Gershwin asked Ravel this at a party in honor of soprano Eva Gauthier and in declining his request Ravel was basically saying that Gershwin should follow his own muse, as Gauthier had done.
The interaction between Gershwin and Ravel is quite interesting.  According to Howard Pollack, author of George Gershwin: His Life and Work, there was a real aesthetic difference between the two that Ravel did not want to interfere with. Pollack described Ravel as the aristocrat of music and Gershwin as a sort of man of the streets composer.  "There’s really an interesting dichotomy there. They admired each other, but probably from some distance," wrote Pollack. Well, I don't know.  Being a fan of Ravel's Concerto in G, looking at the first movement, it's pretty obvious that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue got inside Ravel's head. 

"References to BBC are actually quite common in ancient texts from the Mediterranean and the Middle East, including The Bible:
Ezekial 23
Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
The Hebrews tended to use the terms 'Egypt' and 'Egyptians' in a loose sense to encompass Nubia and Nubians. The Egyptians were perceived as a dark-skinned Other."
~ Peter Frost

That Old Testament is something else, ain't it?  All that incest, rape, family dysfunction, murder, depravity and genocide.  But maybe it is just telling it like it was among semi-civilized tribes thousands of years ago. Not a lot different from what goes on in the boondocks of Afghanistan today, and probably a lot of other places as well.  Cartel-controlled areas of Mexico, for example.  Civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism and savagery that's hard to establish and harder to maintain.  I much prefer the New Testament and don't pay a lot of attention to the Old. It's too alien.  I don't relate to ancient middle easterners or their ways.  I am much more comfortable with the Germanized Christianity (as defined by James Russell in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) than I am with anything non-European.

But if you stripped me naked, tied me up and tickled me unmercifully while loudly playing The Tammys' "Egyptian Shumba,"  I would confess that I suspect all religions to be just plastic banana, phony baloney, good-time rock-and-roll.  Whistling past the graveyard. But what do I know?  I'm only a grassland hominid evolved into an apex predator with a brain too big for its own good. 
And being tortured like that, I would confess to anything you wanted me to confess to.  I would just John McCain it with my mental fingers crossed.  Wouldn't you?

I do often suspect that God is a randy practical joker fond of slapstick humor and sick jokes.  After all, He created human beings didn't He?

About the fixation on gigantic organic gamete injectors, I think that's a guy thing more than a gal thing, and has to do with dominance displays toward other males, as has been recorded among various species of monkey, and not toward females. For a female, the mind and how it is stimulated is vastly more important, at least to me, anyway (always have to be careful not to project! -- no pun intended). As with that English lit prof I wrote about above:  I didn't care how big his Mr. Happy might have been, as far as I was concerned he was a creep.  Make that a Creep with a capital "C."  And that's all he was or ever would be.

 "We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it."
~ Michael Crichton

When I read right-wing websites I am always impressed, sometimes stunned, by the vicious hatred of women the writers and commenters express, especially, as I've noted before, hatred of white women -- by white men, mind you.  I can't help wondering how many wife-beaters and other abusers there are among these people.  And also serial killers.  I'm serious about that.  The hatred of women is so intense and so relentlessly expressed that you really have to consider that. In fact, I know one police officer who, after reading some columns by one of the contributors to a particular on-line publication, expressed the belief that he might well be a serial killer, not of women in his case, but homosexual men.  He's looking into it now, but has stopped talking about it, which indicates to me that it is a serious investigation.

 “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

"Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville

Look Away

 

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

By Margaret Atwood
 

Confess: it’s my profession

that alarms you.

This is why few people ask me to dinner,

though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.

I wear dresses of sensible cut

and unalarming shades of beige,

I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:

no prophetess mane of mine,

complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.

If I roll my eyes and mutter,

if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror

like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,

I do it in private and nobody sees

but the bathroom mirror.

 

 

 

 

In general I might agree with you:

women should not contemplate war,

should not weigh tactics impartially,

or evade the word enemy,

or view both sides and denounce nothing.

Women should march for peace,

or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,

spit themselves on bayonets

to protect their babies,

whose skulls will be split anyway,

or, having been raped repeatedly,

hang themselves with their own hair.

These are the functions that inspire general comfort.

That, and the knitting of socks for the troops

and a sort of moral cheerleading.

Also: mourning the dead.

Sons, lovers, and so forth.

All the killed children.

Instead of this, I tell

what I hope will pass as truth.

A blunt thing, not lovely.

The truth is seldom welcome,

especially at dinner,

though I am good at what I do.

My trade is courage and atrocities.

I look at them and do not condemn.

I write things down the way they happened,

as near as can be remembered.

I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.

Wars happen because the ones who start them

think they can win.

 

In my dreams there is glamour.

The Vikings leave their fields

each year for a few months of killing and plunder,

much as the boys go hunting.

In real life they were farmers.

They come back loaded with splendor.

The Arabs ride against Crusaders

with scimitars that could sever

silk in the air.

A swift cut to the horse’s neck

and a hunk of armor crashes down

like a tower. Fire against metal.

A poet might say: romance against banality.

When awake, I know better.

 

 

 

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.

Finish one off, and circumstances

and the radio create another.

Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently

to God all night and meant it,

and been slaughtered anyway.

Brutality wins frequently,

and large outcomes have turned on the invention

of a mechanical device, viz. radar.

True, valor sometimes counts for something,

as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—

though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,

is decided by the winner. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades

and burst like paper bags of guts

to save their comrades.

I can admire that.

But rats and cholera have won many wars.

Those, and potatoes,

or the absence of them.

It’s no use pinning all those medals

across the chests of the dead.

Impressive, but I know too much.

Grand exploits merely depress me.

 

 

In the interests of research

I have walked on many battlefields

that once were liquid with pulped

men’s bodies and spangled with exploded

shells and splayed bone.

All of them have been green again

by the time I got there.

Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.

Sad marble angels brood like hens

over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar

or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)

The word glory figures a lot on gateways.

Of course I pick a flower or two

from each, and press it in the hotel Bible

for a souvenir.

I’m just as human as you.

 

 But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.

Also statistics:

for every year of peace there have been four hundred

years of war.

 

One step beyond

 I know about an incident very similar to that depicted in this dramatization.  Something that couldn't possibly have happened, but did.

 First broadcast October 6, 1959.

"Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is an errand-boy in heaven, nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power, how then can this one small heart beat, this one small brain think thoughts, unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I."
― Herman Melville

Dear Raymond

 

Downwind from the Sun

We sailed most of the day--42 miles as the seagull flies from the Long Beach light--to reach Santa Barbara Island, which is only a twin-peaked dot about a mile square far out in the ocean all by itself. There's no cove, just an open roadstead down from Arch Point on the east side of the island, which provides shelter from the prevailing westerlies.
We landed our Zodiac on some flat rocks and hiked the island. No one else was there. There's supposed to be a park ranger, but I guess he had gone off somewhere. We visited the sea lion rookeries around Shag Rock, snorkeled in the kelp beds, watched the sea birds enjoying perfect freedom.
The next morning we set sail for San Nicholas Island, another solitary, 24 miles to the southwest. We seemed to fly there, running on a reach before 25-knot winds. We were so far away from any sign of land or civilization that we could have been on another planet.

We anchored at Pyramid Cove off the southeast end of the island and snorkeled among the kelp beds there, too, dodging curious sea lions. I remember it was very windy, and sand blew down on us from the heights of the island, which is a long way from the mainland. I think the closest point is Port Hueneme, well over 50 miles of open ocean away.
At night I slept on deck as I had at Santa Barbara Island and watched the stars. They seemed so close and so bright, with no lights dimming the darkness. It was like being inside an upside-down bowl of stars, because they arched from horizon to horizon with nothing to block them. They rose from the sea and sank into the sea. The Milky Way was a river of stars bisecting the universe and I had a clear sense of spinning at the rim of the galaxy on the edge of infinity.  The meteors that streaked across the sky, some leaving persistent smoke trails, only enhanced the intense understanding of just how vast the universe was.  Without being aware of it, I grasped a deck cleat and clung to it, afraid of falling upward into eternity.
After raising anchor the next morning, we sailed before the prevailing northwesterlies to Santa Catalina Island, rushing through the seas in a perfect glory of sun, foaming waves and sea spray. We moored in Catalina Harbor at the isthmus, on the southwest side of the island. This is a very dramatic, narrow inlet, calm and perfectly protected--such a contrast with the breezy open anchorages of the other islands, with their endless ocean swells and hazardous holding grounds, requiring you to set two anchors for safety.  We walked over to Doug's on the other side of the isthmus at Two Harbors and had cheeseburgers, fries and draft Miller's while listening to day sailors and hikers chat, watched the ferry from San Pedro arrive and depart. I was back.  From wherever I had been.
I had a sudden recollection of that trip the other day and fell into a vivid reverie. The trip was one of the high points of my life, not only for the physical sensations but because of the people I was with and the thoughts in my head. I didn't know it at the time. I guess we never know that when we are living the experience. We only realize it later, when it's gone forever.
These days, I try to make myself aware of the passing of time, of what my life is like at the moment. I remind myself that all this so-very-real present will soon be vanished irrecoverably, lost in an ever-receding past.  At some point, we will only remember a few distorted highlights...if we haven't completely forgotten it. 
The story of our past life is like an absorbing novel that we once read.  We recall reading it, the title is familiar, maybe we vaguely recall what it was about, but the details that kept us turning the pages, that made us regret turning the last page knowing we could never again read it for the first time...well, that's all gone. 
And so it is with our own lives.  All those first times....  I've sailed the Seven Seas many times since my sail to Santa Barbara Island but that was the first time I'd ever sailed out of sight of land, saw the night sky unimpeded by lights and land, heard no human sound.  I swore I would never forget it.  But it is only a washed-out memory now no matter how hard I try to recall every detail, every image, every thought, every emotion.  I can't.  It's gone.

"Oh! Then was the sea like a living creature -- cold, but with a mighty, throbbing heart. I was walking on the heart of the sea; I was sleeping on it; and I could always, night and day, feel it beating beneath my feet, or beneath my back. Or perhaps it was the life, the heart, of the ship that I felt. For now I knew that our schooner was superbly alive. She carried, amid the snow of her sails, a living heart and soul."
--Barbara Newhall Follet, Voyage of the Norman D

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

~ John Masefield

This and That II

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
― George Washington Burnap

I was chatting with two Japanese women and a Chinese woman and the talk turned to the violent attacks on Orientals that have been in the news lately and the Chinese woman said that if the US police and courts won't do anything to stop it maybe China should send army units to take over American cities and enforce law and order.  I started to smile, not taking her statement seriously, but then I noticed the looks on the faces of the two Japanese women.  They looked afraid.

At first, I misread the headline and laughed out loud!

“Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind.”
― Joseph Addison 

Poet Kenneth Rexroth, dubbed "the father of the beat generation," once said that the difference between a liberal and a conservative is that liberals actually believe the lyrics of love songs; that is, they possess a youthful wishfulness and naivety throughout their lives that those of a conservative bent either never had or quickly outgrew, and a good way to preserve that naivety is to avoid confrontations with reality.

 “Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”
― Camille Paglia

 One of my best friends was a Jewish girl with a similar background to me. She was an Air Force brat and officer via ROTC, helped pay her way through college with a series of odd jobs, and I was a Navy brat and officer via OCS and helped pay my way ditto. I only knew she was Jewish because one time we were invited to Christmas dinner  and she mentioned it and I said, "Huh.  Didn't know that.  So you're not coming?"  And she said, "And miss a free meal?  Didn't I just say I was Jewish?"  I knew Scotsmen were supposed to be skinflints but I hadn't know Jews were too.
When we were both stationed on Guam, she got a ride for me on a B-52 when a Japanese film crew came down to Andersen to do a story and since I am fluent in Japanese she arranged for me to be our side's interpreter.
The Japanese on-air talent showed up dressed as if he were going on stage during retro night at the Grand Ole Opry, with rhinestone suit, garish cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat.  I thought he was an arrogant moron and so he proved to be, preferring to ask questions of the crew in his incomprehensible English rather than speak through me in Japanese.  I had to constantly reinterpret for him. Ugh.
We flew a simulated low-altitude bombing run to the range at Farallon de Medinilla and this guy lost his cookies all over his fancy suit.  To be fair, it was a very bumpy, bouncy ride.
I never saw the TV program, but I got the impression it had already been done except for video of the the base and a bomber and crew in action. I suppose it was a typical Japanese production about an American topic -- they consider us stupid and dangerous but entertaining and our country a carnival side show staffed by Darwin Award contestants.

“Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.”
― David Gelernter

"A proper invasion of Taiwan would mean the largest amphibious invasion in human history. An operation on this scale could not be disguised or hidden. We would know about it weeks, and perhaps months, in advance. The weather in the Strait is treacherous. There are only a few months every year where such an invasion could occur, and only a few beaches where an invading force could safely land.
"Our era is defined by a precision-munitions weapons regime. This sort of weapons regime heavily favors the defense. The same A2/AD [Anti-access/area denial],  logic that keeps the U.S. Navy away from Chinese shores can work to keep PLAN vessels away from Taiwanese shores. Missiles, drones, and mines can destroy invading ships many times their cost and inflict thousands of casualties. 
"The PLA is an organization with human-capital problems. I have met kids in the PLA. I naively expected them to exude the confidence, competence, and intelligence of America's enlisted servicemen. They don't. The PLA is an organization with no combat experience, and the Chinese government having told their people for so long that Taiwanese reunification is inevitable and pacification easy, it is not clear to me that PLA peasant-soldiers, products of single-child families, and the broader Chinese public, will be all that resilient in the face of military casualties, setbacks or disruption."
~ Tanner Greer 

“One must never underestimate the profound bigotry, anti-intellectualism, intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.”
― Richard John Neuhaus 

 

 Setting aside all the profound differences among the various white nationalities and subcultures — as different as white eye and hair colors and skin tones — I’ve always thought that a profound pensiveness and melancholia, tied in some way to our love of our past, of our native soil, of our homelands, is very characteristically white, perhaps more northern white than Mediterranean, but even so….
Also a love of the sea, of storms, fog and forest, of nature, of animals, of grand vistas, mountain fastnesses, remote wilderness…and an incurable wanderlust, an urge to see what's over the next hill, around the next bend.
And also a joy in camaraderie and revelry, and a love of daring, of adventure, of challenge — “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield” — in the words of Tennyson.
Or maybe that's just me.

The handshake game is too interesting to ever go away.  I recall reading an old Saturday Evening Post essay by a man who reckoned he was only four handshakes away from George Washington.  My great-grandfather was friends with Charles Lindbergh, whom he met in 1929 when Lucky Lindy visited the Saratoga in Panama.  How many famous people had Lindbergh shaken hands with by that time?  Since I've shaken hands with my father who shook hands with his father, have I in some way shaken hands with all those famous people?   Or does not knowing who they were make it not count?
My great-grandmother was friends with Anne Morrow before she became Mrs. Lindbergh.  I have a photo of my great-grandmother with Anne and Mary Pickford at some social function; she must have shaken hands with Pickford, and since I have...etc...does that mean I have shaken hands with...etc.?
My father once shook hands with G. Gordon Liddy, who was a speaker at some rubber-chicken dinner event -- and I can hear my dad correcting me that it was Liddy who shook hands with him, heh -- so since I've shaken hands with my father, I've vicariously shaken hands with Liddy who must have shaken hands with Richard Nixon who must have shaken hands with Dwight Eisenhower who....

“Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.”
― Camille Paglia

Wait for me!

 

We used to be smarter, or at least better educated

Believe it or not, I read the following fairly obscure and erudite joke in a science fiction story by Murray Leinster (nee William Fitzgerald Jenkins), "Sam, This is You," first published in the May, 1955, edition of Galaxy:   

A telephone lineman's girlfriend, urging him to aspire to better things, asks him: "Do you want to spend your life with your arms wrapped around a Pole?" And he replies, "Well, it was good enough for George Sand." 

You don't get it?  Well, see, the composer Frédéric Chopin was Polish and George Sand, who was a girl not a boy, was a 19th century French novelist with whom he had an intense affair.  The artist Eugène Delacroix even painted a portrait of them together.  Neither Leinster nor his editor, H.L. Gold, thought the joke would fly above the heads of the magazine's audience, primarily young men, including lots of high school and even junior high school students.  Alas, could the same be said today? 

 The Great Guildersleeve, a family situation comedy spun off from Fibber McGee and Molly, was immediately popular when it premiered in 1941. It was sponsored by Kraft Foods, which used the show to promote Parkay margarine and its new product, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese -- "cooks in seven minutes!"  The adventures of buffoonish Uncle Guildy and his starry-eyed niece Margery and school-hating nephew Leroy centered around life in the small town of Summerfield.  

In one episode, broadcast in 1942, Leroy is complaining because he has to memorize a chunk of Longfellow's narrative poem Hiawatha and recite it in front of the class.  Guildersleeve chides him, reminding him that the other students in his class also have to memorize parts of the poem and recite it so that the whole poem will be recited by the class.  Then he says that he had to memorize the poem when he was in school and can still remember it.  He begins intoning "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green...."

Guildy, Margery and Leroy.

Margery interrupts him and sarcastically says, "That's Evangeline!" as the live audience laughs loudly.   The audience got the joke and when the script was written everyone involved with the show knew the radio audience would get the joke, too, because everybody in those days had to read those poems in school and memorize parts of them.  They had to learn other poems as well. It was part of being socialized as an American, so everyone could recite The Village Blacksmith, The Snow Storm and The Old Oaken Bucket, to name just a few.

But today?  What kid is required to memorize any poem, let alone one as demanding as Evangeline or Hiawatha? What kid has even heard of them?  What teacher, for that matter.

In a 1943 broadcast of the Jack Benny Show, a comedy-variety program sponsored by Post Grape Nuts Flakes cereal, one of the commercials for the cereal was made up  of the names of four operas:  Faust, Aida, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The audience laughed at the cleverness of the bit.  Again, neither the writer, sponsor or anyone else associated with the show thought such a commercial would fly over the heads of the audience because everybody knew those operas, familiar old standards that lots of people could pick out a tune from on the piano or sing.

But today?  How many people have even heard of these operas  -- or any opera -- and would "get" the  commercial?  It would make no sense to them.  Certainly no ad agency would approve of such a commercial.

I could drag out a bunch more similar examples  -- Leroy's grade school teacher referring to Guildersleeve and Judge Hooker's friendship as like that between Damon and Pythias; the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "Long-haired Hare" in which Bugs' conductor character is reverently called Leopold and the audience is expected to know and appreciate that the reference is to Leopold Stokowski  -- but I think the point is made:  People were smarter, better educated and more sophisticated in their tastes generations ago than they are today.

Why is that?  What have we done to ourselves?

Here are two stanzas from Longfellow's The Village Blacksmith.  Isn't this a poem every child would be better off learning by heart so that it could be recalled easily to mind throughout life?

Toiling,--rejoicing,--sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begun,
Each evening sees it close.
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose. 

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

The Jack Benny program with the "opera" ad.  It begins at 13:06 into the show.

October!