CONGRATULATIONS Iraq!

Once again, the Iraqi peoples are practicing democracy, celebrating it in fact, as they turn out in record numbers to cast their votes for their choices of leadership.

The march of liberty and democracy continues, as more of our fellow world citizens realize that this is the way of the future of mankind, with occasional disruptions by madmen and evil ones.
Too bad that this chap doesn't quite get it yet:

“It’s an extremist government we would like an end to the occupation,” said Ahmed Majid, 31. “Really the only true solution is through politics. But there is the occupation and the only way that will end is with weapons.”

Wrong, sir. Our "occupation" will end when your military is ready to keep the peace and order in your country. And we will do so peacably. And gladly.


Brad

Gerald Ford: a compelling figure

Compelling is not an adjective that's usually applied to a description of our 38th president, but it seems to fit when one considers a few of the following facets of his life:


1935 Turns down contract offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers of the National Football League, deciding instead to attend Yale University Law School. Despite Chevy Chase's caricature of him during his term in office, he chose the more cerebral profession of law over the hero-status of football. (Interestingly, in '35 the Lions were NFL champs, and in '36 the Packers were, so he was sought by two of the best in league.)


1948 Elected to the House of Representatives. In that election and his 12 subsequent re-elections, always receives more than 60 percent of the vote. Only 35 years old then, and always a clear favorite.

Nov. 29, 1963 Appointed by President Johnson to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is the last remaining member of the commission.
Now, I have to admit that this particular item is one that prompted me to post. One wonders what he knows about that fateful day in American history...


Aug 9, 1974 He is the only president not to have been elected either president or vice president.
A singular distinction that assures his place in presidential trivia for generations henceforth.

Sept. 5, 1975 Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of imprisoned cult leader Charles Manson, points a gun at Ford as he shakes hands in Sacramento, Calif. No shots are fired.
Sept. 22, 1975 Radical Sara Jane Moore tries unsuccessfully to shoot Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco Again I admit, this item surprised me. I recall "Squeaky" Fromme (frequently, in fact, for some as-yet unexplored reason..) and her attempt on the president's life, but I had forgotten about Sara Jane Moore. This guy had two attempts on his life! (Both by women, interestingly... What's that all about?)

Anyway, I wish him and his family Godspeed and a blessed CHRISTmas to them all.
Be well, Mr. President!

Brad

A minor personal regret

I wish that I had routinely worn any particular cologne when my children were young.

Almost any brand would have worked. Nothing expensive or hip, necessarily, and even something as common as Brut or Old Spice would suffice. Just some particular scent for my kids to connect me with. Rather, one distinct aroma which they could one day connect to me.

Even better, one pleasantly distinct aroma with which my kids could one day connect with me, across the miles and years, eventually even crossing the spiritual strata between this and the afterlife. (Them here, me there.)

The third paragraph of this post by James Lileks got me thinking about this, and it's something which I've pondered before. The incredible memory-trigger of scent, and one which I've deprived my children of: Dad's cologne. A masculine aroma they would've come to know as mine, and might occasionally happen across as their lives unfold over the passing years, which would instantly transport them to that mental-emotional realm of memory.

And it's precisely why I would differ with James on the criteria for choosing a scent, which he comments on in his piece, "... mostly I don’t like cologne. It fades. It turns. In the end it all ends up smelling like Brut or some fresh citrusy anti-Brut, and it gets on your shirts... I’ll stick with my Eucalyptus-Spearmint profile, gathered from Bath & Body Works soaps and shampoos. I know that someday they will stop making it, and I will cease to have the same faint aroma I have today. That’s an odd thought, but true. Whereas guys will smell like some variant of Brut forever. They may call it something else...but it's...favored by too many gents to ever go out of style."

It's just that sort of popularity I'd be counting on, to keep my scent unexpectedly available. A serendipity awaiting discovery. An aromatic trigger to unlock dormant memories of dear ol' Dad, brought vividly to the present moment for them; hopefully to prompt a warm smile of fondness, and happy anticipation of reunion on the other side.

Perhaps it's not entirely too late- I'm still around and plan to be for awhile. Perhaps I'll go out and pick a cologne, or let my daughter select one for me. One that my kids can someday fondly recall me by, whenever they get a whiff of that aroma they could come to know as... Dad's cologne.

Brad

Lileks on Vonnegut

As an addendum to my post on Kurt Vonnegut, here are some excerpts from a blog post by James Lileks (although it's not normally advisable to quote Lileks incompletely-because the flow of his prose is often so crucial to the full impact of his writing- I thought these particular points worth sharing) :

“…all it would take is a few book editors in a few magazines to say “to hell with the old coot; I have a cousin serving in Iraq, and I’ll be goddamned if I give this hairy old fool a pass because he wrote a book my brother loved in college. What’s the matter with us? Do we excuse everything because it kicks Bush in the nuts?”

“Vonnegut is an addled old fool whose brain has rusted in the antiestablishment default position for so long he cannot distinguish between suicide bombers and people who stage a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter.”

“…seems to think that suicide bombings literally happen in a vacuum, an unpopulated space where the bombers just pop like soap bubbles. It may be painless for them – alas – but it is not painless for the victims.”

“Personally, I think it’s a worse thing to deprive someone of their own self-life.” (NOTE: Vonnegut accused the US of depriving the Islamofascist terrorists of their self-respect. Here's his quote: "They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect.")


With tongue firmly-planted in cheek: “It goes without saying he (Vonnegut) will be spending his senior years naked in a cell, fighting rats for a scrap of bread, writing brave quatrains on the wall with a shoelace-tip dipped in rat’s blood, awakened daily at 4 AM with bright lights and the national anthem. Such is life in Chimpsuit McHaillihitler’s America.”

Thanks for the usual stellar wordsmith work, James.

Brad

Vonnegut going senile?

It's very sad to learn that the brilliant mind that crafted the world of Harrison Bergeron, with such scathingly humorous insight, has atrophied into the cliched amoral grey matter of the feverswamp Left.

Although he was always a darling of the Left, Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story, Harrison Bergeron, expresses a conservative perspective, not a liberal one. (In some people's formulas the inconsistency qualifies him as a moderate.) At least in 1961, Vonnegut had a moment of clarity about the foolish and unjust pursuit of equality-as-a-virtue to be valued above freedom and excellence. The liberal dream to "level the playing field" knows no end, and doesn't acknowledge or factor-in differing degrees of individual talent, effort, and goals. Although anyone who reads the story would recognize the cruel madness of the Bergeron's 2081 world, liberalism, as it's manifested today, would be the seed from which such a brier patch of twisted logic would sprout.
The opening sentence, "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal", sounds like a liberal utopia.
The satirical story stealthily embraces and promotes the very essence of liberty: being allowed to follow your talents and determination as far as they can take you, and to reap the fruits of your labor.
It was a brief, isolated excursion into reality for Vonnegut. But I digress...

This "grand old man of American letters" (as David Nason calls him in the story from The Australian) has compared our government, or rather, the Bush Administration, to Hitler's Reichstag, in which Vonnegut sees Bush taking unaccountable power unto himself and abusing it.

Interviewed in his own publication, "In These Times", the 80 year old socialist said " I myself feel that our country has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities."

Implying that President Bush is one of these psychopathic personalities ("P.P."), Vonnegut says ""With a P.P., decisiveness is all. Or, to put it another way, we now have a Reichstag fire of our own."
Translation: BushCheneyRoveRumsfeldWolfowitz and the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy were behind 9/11.
Paranoia will destroy ya.

"..I'm mad about being American", he says, and "I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries. I don't want to belong to that kind of a country." So, is that the criteria he chooses to define Iraq? Little? By that measurement, the police should never go after anyone littler than their department. It isn't fair; it makes them bullies, I guess.
Vonnegut said of the captured Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War: "Those men are my brothers. All soldiers are". Regardless, apparently, of whose side their on, and for what cause they'll kill.

Referring to the Islamofascist terrorists we're fighting, he says it was "sweet and honorable" to die for what you believe in, and said "I regard them as very brave people". "He rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs". Also, according to Nason, Vonnegut "equated the actions of suicide bombers with...Truman's 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima". And in 2003, reports Nason, Vonnegut wrote that "the US was hated around the world "because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies".

True to form for so many "enlightened" and "progressive" liberal hypocrites, Vonnegut doesn't hold women, in general, in very high regard, either. Referring to psychopathic personalities, he says "Women are attracted to them. I mean, this is a defect, but women are attracted to them because they are so confident. But this is a serious defect..."
I thought Lefties were supposed to be such great feminists? Those don't strike me as very respectful sentiments.
And on a related note, he describes Gordon Parks as "a black genius". Why mention his skin color? Is his pigmentation related to his genius? Should he be more admired for it?

Finally, while comparing Socialism's ideal of "economic justice" to The Sermon on the Mount, Vonnegut claims that "the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was."

Kurt Vonnegut better hope that He is.

Brad

"Like Joseph fleeing Potiphar's wife"

For years now, that phrase pops into my head when trying to communicate the need for urgent evacuation from a non-emergency situation that is, none-the-less, an impending potential crisis. (The need to flee could be mine or someone else's.) I say non-emergency because the phrase sounds too flippant to use in an actual emergency.
In an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard...whoa, got a crossed-message there. Sorry about that! In an actual emergency, it might undermine the sense of urgency needed to respond quickly. It might even stop someone in their tracks (or at least put a quizzical look on their biblically-illiterate face, while they try...) to decipher an increasingly obscure allusion to one chapter in the Book of Genesis. The pertinent passages are here, in case you need a refresher. Or if you have no idea what I'm babbling about.

I said the phrase pops into my head. I haven't actually given it voice very often, probably to avoid being viewed as a total geek. But it's there, just the same. I love the picture it paints in my head. I can actually see Joseph tearing away (perhaps with a spin move ala Barry Sanders or Chuck Foreman) from his master's wife, leaving his empty garment in her hand, and unquenched lust in her heart.
The image it creates is akin to a cartoon character (Roadrunner is a perfect example) departing so quickly (with the accompanying bullet-ricochet sound) that his hat is suspended midair where his head once was, (Roadrunner, of course, didn't wear a hat, but you know what I mean.) fleeing post-haste.

And what on earth, you ask, prompts me to bring this up? (Glad you finally asked!) Well, someone left an April 2002 copy of Catholic Digest in the breakroom at work (no, it's not a Jesuit dentist's waiting room), and I was reading a very well-written article by Bill Dodds titled "The Easy Way to Heaven". A humorous and utterly digestible piece, yet with such striking clarity for such a celestial topic that it's downright revelatory.
Subtitled "A cowardly, thieving plan that will send you straight to paradise", Dodds lists three steps: 1. Be a coward 2. Cheat often 3. Steal if you possibly can.

One of the passages highlighted reads: "Sometimes fighting temptation by fighting temptation is foolish. It isn't that you're overmatched; you have God on your side. But why fight when you can run. Upon reading that line, that image of Joseph fleeing temptation (we at least hope that this righteous servant was fleeing temptation, not just an ugly shrew) popped into my head again. (This time I believe I actually did say it out loud, to noone there.)
If he were about 12 yrs old at the time, it might have looked something like this. Minus the two comrades and a dog.
And the garments.
And the sign would read "No sinning".
And his friends wouldn't be half-naked, either. What was going on back there, anyway? Joseph?!


My kids (and a brother or two) have accused me of thinking too much. Maybe they're right.

Brad