But you sit down in that chair, right there
and let me show you how it's done...

Celeb twitter feedback on Eastwood's performance last night:

"Clint Eastwood made my day." — Charlie Daniels, country singer.

 "I. Love. Clint Eastwood." — Blake Shelton, country singer and judge on "The Voice."

"I heard that Clint Eastwood was channeling me at the RNC. My lawyers and I are drafting our lawsuit." — comic actor Bob Newhart, referring to his signature one-way-conversation routines.

'If Clint Eastwood ever talks to a chair on national TV, people will need a way to reassure each other' — inventor of Twitter, March 2006." — Patton Oswalt, comedian and actor on "The King of Queens."

The Captains tell:  They pay you well.
and they say, they need sailing men
to show the way (and leave today...)

Was it you that said,"How Long?"
"How long ... to the point of no return?"


First off, on recent campaign coverage:
I loved Clint Eastwood's performance.
Hit his mark.  Very real, very funny, very honest.

The politicians can't do that, by the nature of the game.
Striving to be so non-offensive, they lose at the honesty game.
There's a reason the Capitol players in the Hunger Games were depicted as behaving so ... artificially, I think.  Eastwood gave us Real Life.  He remembered the unemployed.  He said what so many out here are thinking...

President Obama isn't getting the job done. Period.
I chuckled a bit recently when I read a liberal writer pick up on the feminist line:  "In order for a woman to succeed in a man's world, she has to be twice as good.  Fortunately, that is not difficult."

He was making the case that President Obama -- a black man in a white man's world -- has to be twice as good at his job to gain public acceptance.   But who believes, honestly, that the president's performance is even up to par?

Voters were promised a man of compromise who had what it takes to bring folks together, to bridge differences, to transcend a simplistic black-and-white worldview to move forward together and tackle the admittedly difficult economic and military challenges to the country...

In reality?  The political world is much different than moving forward by bringing together black and white, conservative and liberal students on the Harvard Law Review.  The performance standard is much different than the job evaluation given to work performed under community grants.

Some of us suspected the junior senator wasn't ready.  Those "present" votes, plus the lack of a track record -- just the "potential" -- didn't promise much, if you were operating and evaluating in reality.

Still, people bring their own guilt and baggage to the voting booth, and he got the campaigning job done all right.  He won.  Wasn't that the task at hand afterall, we were reminded.  Simply ... brilliant.

But then, reality set in.  The Clintons knew what the new president would be up against, even with a Democrat-majority Congress.  Perhaps they would have been ready to operate under such reality from day one.

President Obama was not ready.  His team of economic advisers and political gurus also "won" in that they too secured more lucrative positions and relished the political gamesmanship.  But they forgot about the team.

They cut the working class from the party. They courted celebrities.  They enjoyed the spoils of their victory.  Meanwhile, the gasoline prices that fuel so much of the domestic economic engine sucked up more and more of personal budgets.  It didn't pay to save, with paltry interest rates, but who wants to spend on a rainy day today when there are darker storms on the horizon looming ever close to view?

If it took Clint Eastwood and the empty-chair routine to acknowledge these realities, so be it.  He's an artist, and art is underrated in representing reality.  Especially government-funded art.

He hit his mark last night.  Thanks again, Clint.
For showing up, and getting the job done.

Both NU grads, both embarrassments to honest news coverage...

During the broadcast, Chalian can be heard saying that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were "not concerned at all" and "happy to have a party with black people drowning." Chalian seemed to be referring to the simultaneous occurrence of the GOP convention convening in Tampa and Hurricane Isaac hammering its way across the gulf coast and through New Orleans.
A Yahoo spokesperson released a statement regarding the company's decision to fire Chalian "effective immediately:"

David Chalian's statement was inappropriate and does not represent the views of Yahoo!. He has been terminated effective immediately. We have already reached out to the Romney campaign, and we apologize to Mitt Romney, his staff, their supporters and anyone who was offended.

I think I liked it better when reporters just covered the news.  Honestly.
Who cares about your opinions really?  Give us facts, not spin.

think... thought." *

the light was dimming,
but the Dream was true.

Hope you've enjoyed our virtual parade:  a highlight of nostalgia, a bit of old time Americana, served up with a still healthy respect for the American Dream, I think...

Been busy here.  Some stories I've written, but intend to ... "shop around" rather than putting my work here, gratis.

Summer is blooming -- "From Garden to Kitchen" is a small binder book Ruth gave me years ago, each vegetable gets a page, and it offers practical advice for putting away what you've grown.  ("Putting away" in terms of both getting it into your body immediately, as well as preparing for the winter to come.)

Summer's lease hath all too short a date. 
True enough here:  the drier summer, the morning chill, the sunny afternoons and decreased daylight -- all contributing to the yellowing and downfall already of early leaves, and premature green acorns.

Who knows what's to come?, but it can never hurt to be properly prepared.

ADDED:  No, I'm not collecting acorns, green or otherwise, for food.  (But thanks for asking...)

or,

Whenever this particular incarnation of the culture wars erupts, I think back to my earliest experiences with my august employer, The Atlantic. On the scale of ashy to classy, I was more the former than the latter. But my relationship with the magazine often put me in the dining company of men and women who were not unused to nice things.

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. My new companions had other beliefs, a fact evidenced by our divergent waistlines.

They organized dinners featuring several small courses, most of which were only partially eaten. The general dining practice consisted of buttering half a dinner roll, dallying with the salad, nibbling at the fish and taking a spoonful of dessert. The only seconds they requested were coffee and wine.

I left the first of these dinners in bemused dudgeon. “Crazy rich white people,”  I would scoff. “Who goes to a nice dinner and leaves hungry?”

In fact, they were not hungry at all. I discovered this a few dinners later, when I found myself embroiled in this ritual of half-dining. It was as though some invisible force was slowing my fork, forcing me into pauses, until I found myself nibbling and sampling my way through the meal.

And when I rose both caffeinated and buzzed, I was, to my shock, completely satiated.

Trite, but true ... sometimes less is more.*

Make it a great Saturday yourself out there,
whatever you're putting on your plate to satisfy your daily needs.
-----------------------------

* Know thyself -- always like that one myself too...

You know how they say when a divorce is truly coming, it's odd in its silence:  the arguing, the passionate disagreeing, ends because... what's the point?

I think that's what's happening right now in politics:  Nothing is is saved.  No one has changed.  *

Don't take the silence, the lack of gabbing it up on the nonsense topics to mean folks are happy with what's going on and don't disagree with most everything that's ... going down, as the cool cats seem to say...

(Btw, have gas prices really spiked where you're at in the past few days?  What's up with that?)
------------------------------
*   We've just been busy misinterpreting the other guy's  argument, concluding ... what a dummy thou art.   Yup, that's advancing things mightily.

I suppose, if the world keeps turning the way things currently go, all those compassionate-minded folk flying around, getting rich off the present-day system are contented, really...

"Good enough for goverment work", or "societal changes borne by thee, not by me..."

IN other news, I hear DC's economy is back to boom times.  That must really mean something to the rest of us, right?

and I'm Bound to Get the Friction On...

Congratulations to the U.S. Olympics Womens'  Soccer Team 2012.

By Barry Svrulga, The Washington Post

LONDON — They stood on the medal stand because of Alex Morgan’s head and Abby Wambach’s feet, because of Hope Solo’s hands and Becky Sauerbrunn’s brain. There are teams that pay lip service to the group they have assembled, to togetherness and unselfishness and sacrifice for each other. And then there is the  U.S. women's soccer team, which pulls those qualities together, ties them with a bow, and presents them as it did Thursday night, with Olympic gold at stake.

“We all have such an extreme belief in each other,” Wambach said. “I can’t explain it. . . . It’s the trust that we’re going to find a way.”

"No Retreat, Baby... No Surrender."

Remember Walt Kowalski?
The working-class white helping his immigrant neighbors help themselves, with a leg up, a safe and fair playing field, and a loan of the tools needed to get started on the job(s)?

Not handouts.
Not lowering standards.
Not bitter resentment against working whites.

Not the embrace, as his children had done, of a skewed and deadly status quo that permitted them to personally benefit, then hide their eyes from the damage systematically being done the country, Walt's home community ...

If you haven't seen it, you ought to rent it.

If you've lived, or you're living it, you might understand Eastwood's endorsement **:

“Now more than ever do we need Governor Romney. I’m going to be voting for him…”

Eastwood also added to the room full of Romney backers that the presidential hopeful would restore “a decent tax system that we need badly… so that there’s a fairness and people are not pitted against one another as who’s paying taxes and who isn’t.”

Or,
who's breeding and feeding their children on another man's daily work, children that naturally will need special education, nevermind a morning breakfast, to meet their needs of a basic functional education.  Standards slip for everyone.

When education is scorned, when violence enters the classrooms, when excuses are permitted ("my boy just can't sit still, keep his hands to himself for hours at a time"), standards fall.

When you lose the school districts  ("F" schools with low test scores; only the motivated individuals learning), property values fall.  Can you get out?  Where will you go?  Will the representational boundaries simply be redrawn to artificially empower the (former) minorities, who apparently could not compete electorally, in more than one district, without the continual artificial help? 

(The idea being to spread out the "minority" domination by keeping just enough of the white population captured essentially;  if through relocation they begin to regain political power in another district, simply redraw the boundaries so there is continued "minority" representation -- from the likes of say, Jesse Jackson Jr. -- in the Congressional districts.  It stinks when it's deliberately skewed against whites, just like it stinks when it's redrawn to deliberately skew against other numerical minorities.)

In short,
will the rules once again change in the middle of the game, so that the sacrifices one made to prepare himself and his children will be discounted, in order to artifically empower preferred others, who have grown fat and powerful themselves off the workingman's efforts and tax redistribution that pays for another man's  childbirth bills, daily food needs, and shelter for his women and children.


When will the liberal elites begin to personally pay -- in terms of mass displacement, loss of schools (though the physical structures still stand) and community decline via the sudden, almost violent, destability that the anti-poverty policies and government finance interventions of the past decades have wrought?

We can pretend, as many sociologists and pundits prefer, it's simply a loss of discipline and values in working-class whites.  Poor choices. 

Not running away, apparently, early enough from a stable community in fear of what the future collectively holds.  But the losses are there for those who remain.

No denying.

------------------------------
* For Maureen Dowd.

**

Reuters reporter Sam Youngman made a reference to a Super Bowl ad about Detroit starring Eastwood, which at the time stirred speculation he might be supporting President Barack Obama.

"Is this your second act of half time in America endorsing Romney," asked Youngman, to which Eastwood replied, "Maybe."

Someone slated to teach essay writing in the fall to undergrads at MIT recently confessed to never having read any Gore Vidal.  Wow.

I suspect the bright MIT undergrads will catch on to the charade -- the author himself is more an oral "dictator" than a writer it seems, and sometimes doesn't fully edit what the programs spill back.  I can't help him with the summer homework necessary to teach a broad depth of essay writing, but I can help introduce him to Vidal's work*, as others have done for me...

(Not directly: I just read reviews, all sorts of news, and go to the source material myself for insight...)

Try The Zenner Trophy, for starters.  Not an essay, but one of the short stories found in The City and the Pillar.  (Vidal's father Eugene, was an athlete himself, an early pioneer in flight, who passed on his physical genes to his son.  Being a strong physical guy, it mattered in his approach to life, I think.)

It's an easy read, and perhaps conveys more than you know about the young Vidal's attitude, which consequently led to those well-written, and challenging, essays.  He knew the political class of his time, inside and out.  He was honest enough to share too.  Read it, even if you don't think WASPs of 1950 have anything to teach you today?  You might just surprise yourself, and grow your mind beyond its self-imposed boundaries.

Yep, even struggling black men.
---------------------
ADDED:
* (... You're welcome.)

Well you can count your blessings, instead of sheep...

I dreamt that I went to Heaven and an angel was showing me around. We walked side-by-side inside a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, "This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received."

I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.

Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section.

The angel then said to me, "This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them." I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.

Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly doing nothing.. "This is the Acknowledgment Section," my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed.

"How is it that there is no work going on here? " I asked.

"So sad," the angel sighed. "After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments."

"How does one acknowledge God's blessings? " I asked.

"Simple," the angel answered. Just say, "Thank you, Lord."

"What blessings should they acknowledge?" I asked.

"If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world. If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy."

"And if you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity."

"If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day."

"If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation... You are ahead of 700 million people in the world."

"If you can attend a church without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death, you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world."

"If your parents are still alive and still married.... you are very rare."

If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, you're unique to all those in doubt and despair..."

Sure beats trying to compete your way to grace, by smugly ... one-upping the next guy.

Something tells me, there's a bit more to it than that...

Learning to Do. Doing to Learn.
Earning to Live. Living to Serve.

FFA Float.
(Future Farmers of America)


Running Water.
(Got that now?)

“The phone rang and somebody said, ‘Hello,’ and I said, ‘Hi, is Marilyn there?’ and she said, ‘No, she’s not,’ and I said, ‘Well, this is Mike. I’m in class with her. Could you take a message?’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s a holiday,’ because it was the Fourth of July weekend, and that, to her, was an excuse for not taking a message for herself.”

No one ever said Marilyn wasn’t complicated.

...

She made $27 million last year, gobs more than she ever earned in life. She was the poster girl at Cannes, a festival she never attended. And her time in England making “The Prince and the Showgirl” was the subject of a movie that got two Oscar nominations, even though the golden girl never won a gold statuette herself.

...

While making her last movie, “Something’s Got to Give,” Marilyn posed nude for a young photographer, Larry Schiller, hoping to ratchet up her $100,000 salary to Elizabeth Taylor’s million-dollar territory for “Cleopatra.”

Schiller wrote in Vanity Fair that he saw the confidence that spurred Marilyn to become one of the first stars to create her own production company. “There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on,” she laughed.

He also saw her dark companion, insecurity. “Is that all I’m good for?” she keened about nudity.

Yet Schiller told The Associated Press that “it’s women that have kept Marilyn alive, not men.” He says teenage girls flock to see gallery shows, and that the photos selling now accentuate her humanity, not her anatomy.

“I think,” he said, “people want to see her now as a real person.”

or, "What's Up, Doc?"

Here's Eyman on Vidal:

The interesting thing about Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday night a the age of 86 after more than six decades in the public eye, was that he was so many things, often all at the same time: novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, political candidate, political scold, pansexualist, public intellectual, and, finally and most lastingly, Bitch Queen of American letters.

That he wasn’t equally proficient at everything he did was disguised by his personality - a malicious purr of aphoristic ill-will. That tone preceded him in his hundreds of television appearances and it carried over into his prose.

Vidal’s personality was so strong that his novels tended to be weak - there were very few characters whose conversation didn’t resemble Gore Vidal’s, and a general focus on man’s innate passion for power. There was rarely a sense that his characters were living, breathing people, perhaps because Vidal considered himself a man of ideas and never quite give up the idea of fiction as a variation on the lecture.

A few notable exceptions: Julian, his novel of the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, which, despite Vidal’s general amusement at the very idea of God, emerged as a triumph, and Burr, about Aaron Burr, who not only betrayed his country, but killed Alexander Hamilton, and who undoubtedly appealed to Vidal’s fondness for rogues.

Contrastingly, Vidal’s essays, on subjects ranging from High Literature to modern politics, are as good as anything written in this country, and will undoubtedly constitute his claim on literary posterity.
...
Leavening his increasing crankiness was his humor, which was most savage when dealing with other writers, who had the temerity to work in his vineyard (“The three saddest words in the world: Joyce Carol Oates”), or politicians, who, following in the footsteps of Mark Twain, he regarded as a predominantly criminal class.

He was at all times a great character and, when it came to non-fiction, often a great writer. He is quite irreplaceable.