The Idea of America, and Other Miscellaneous Ideas

I still believe in the idea of America, schmaltzy as that sounds. 

We have local representatives that we elect every two years, because they most closely represent their constituents' current views. We have senators serving 6-year terms, so they are insulated from current trends of thought. Representatives and senators make the laws on our behalf. The president enforces the laws. The judiciary determines the constitutionality of the laws. 

Some think we have a president, the end. "President" is not the name for that kind of ruler.

I believe in the sentiment that America is an experiment. The experiment could fail. It's fashionable to blame our problems on the government, but our system is set up as a government of the people. If the government is the problem, the people are the problem, i.e. we are the problem. 

I'm struck by the last line of Jimmy Carter's statement on the death of George Floyd- "We need a government as good as its people, and we are better than this."

True. Some aren't better than this, but WE are better than this.

June 6, 2020

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Untranslatable Words

Pana Po’o- To scratch one's head while trying to remember something.

Hawaiian

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Vincent Bugliosi, prosecuting attorney in the Tate-LaBianca murders, with a prescient quote from Helter Skelter:

"You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time. They may not believe it 100 percent, but they will still draw opinions from it, especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from." 

He left us on this day in 2015. He would have something to see on our current state of affairs, but then again, it's so obvious that it is barely even worth mentioning.

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16 Cognitive Distortions, Positive Psychology, by Courtney Ackerman

15. Always Being Right

Perfectionists and those struggling with Imposter Syndrome will recognize this distortion – it is the belief that we must always be right. For those struggling with this distortion, the idea that we could be wrong is absolutely unacceptable, and we will fight to the metaphorical death to prove that we are right.

For example, the internet commenters who spend hours arguing with each other over an opinion or political issue far beyond the point where reasonable individuals would conclude that they should “agree to disagree” are engaging in the “Always Being Right” distortion. To them, it is not simply a matter of a difference of opinion, it is an intellectual battle that must be won at all costs.

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Hasan Minaj asked Trevor Noah if he was nervous as he was about to begin hosting the Daily Show... Trevor said that if things don't work out he can always fall back on poverty. Just a perfect response, and from a guy who grew up in poverty. It's the last episode of CNN's History of Late Night Television tonight. I've really enjoyed it.

June 6, 2021

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Tom McCarthy and Gary Mathews are talking about ghost stories from various hotels they stay in when playing on the road. I don't remember Harry and Whitey ever getting into that. Maybe it was a taboo subject, and maybe the reason Whitey's hair was white?

June 6, 2013

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Fox should have known not to mic the ump... and "no, I'm not fucking kidding."

June 6, 2009

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Today is national Drive-In Movie Theater day, commemorating the first drive-in theater which opened on this day in 1933, in Camden, New Jersey.

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What a day in World War II history- we destroyed the Japanese at Midway in 1942 and stormed the beaches in Normandy in 1944. It's impossible to put oneself in the mindset that we might not have won World War II, the same as we might not have won the Civil War, and the same as we might not win Civil War II.

Anne Frank's diary entry on D-Day: 

"Oh, Kitty, the best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they have had their knives so at our throats, that the thoughts of friends and delivery fills us with confidence!"

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The kid who was praying for Bryson Stott's 9th inning walk-off home run is getting a lot of attention. Not getting a lot of attention though- the fact that Bryce Harper tied it up at 6-6 with his 6th career grand slam. Was God on our side or was the Devil??? Let me give you a hint- we beat the Angels!

June 6, 2022

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Co-developer of The Simpsons, Sam Simon, was born on this day in 1955. I like this quote:

"Boxing should probably be banned. But until then, I'm a big fan."

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Björn Borg was born on this day in 1956. He won eleven Grand Slam singles titles including five consecutive Wimbledons.

"My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories."

Sure, he doesn't give up in a match, But he retired after winning five straight Wimbledon titles! That's insane.

He also said, "If you're afraid of losing, then you daren't win." He should have given this advice to himself. Does he even know himself?

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Plato- "Know thyself."

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Carl Jung left us in 1961, on Borg's 5th birthday.

“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

Fear of defeat was Borg's shadow.

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Woody Allen, playing Allan in Play It Again, Sam:

Allan : That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

Museum Girl : Yes, it is.

Allan : What does it say to you?

Museum Girl : It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

Allan : What are you doing Saturday night?

Museum Girl : Committing suicide.

Allan : What about Friday night?

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At the DC zoo yesterday, the smash hit was... cicadas.

June 6, 2021

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Jung again, “Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.”

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Robert F. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. June 6th, 1968

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."

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The wonderful Anne Bancroft left us on this day in 2005. Mrs. Robinson is one of the all time great roles.

[Mrs. Robinson comes into Elaine's room, naked, and locks the door with Benjamin inside with her] 

Benjamin : Oh God. Oh, let me out.

Mrs. Robinson : Don't be nervous.

Benjamin : Get away from that door.

Mrs. Robinson : I want to say something first.

Benjamin : Jesus Christ.

Mrs. Robinson : Benjamin, I want you to know that I'm available to you, and if you won't sleep with me this time...

Benjamin : Oh, my Christ.

Mrs. Robinson : If you won't sleep with me this time I want you to know that you can call me up anytime you want and we'll make some kind of arrangement.

Benjamin : Oh...

Mrs. Robinson : Do you understand what I...

Benjamin : Let me out.

Mrs. Robinson : Benjamin, do you understand what I just said?

Benjamin : Yes! Yes. Let me out!

Mrs. Robinson : I find you very attractive.

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Other notable birthdays- Nathan Hale (1755), Paul Giamatti (1967)

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Other notable deathdays- William Quantrill (1865) Louis Lumière (1948)

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I kind of love it when people become the worst enemies of the former selves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mSE-Iy_tFY

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Free Think, June 6, 2021- Editing one gene extends mouse life expectancy by 23%, By Kristin Houser

The article says that the discovery could lead to a “fountain of youth” for humans. Well damn... it feels like if we live a little bit longer, we'll be able to live forever.

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Oh my, that Chromatics song. I think I've watched the last 5 minutes of the 2nd episode of the new Twin Peaks maybe 20 times.

June 6, 2017

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Genuinely a hard test. I'm very familiar with Orwell and Obama and still got a D.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/orwell-or-obama
June 6, 2013

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MSNBC- Trump takes the USS McCain story in a new, weird direction

"It's been five days since we learned that the White House wanted the USS McCain moved "out of sight." Since then, Team Trump has changed its story five times."

I like reflecting on the fact that the president needs to make up lies, and needs to obfuscate in order to protect his fragile ego from the inevitable results of his mean-spirited and petty actions. This is a minor example, for more examples just look at any reputable news outfit's posts any given day.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-takes-the-uss-mccain-story-new-weird-direction

June 6, 2019

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Bill Moyers: It’s happening before our very eyes
I rank Bill Moyers in the highest echelon of journalists, and he's said very little over the last three years. This article is a must-read.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-moyers-its-happening-before-our-very-eyes/

June 6, 2020

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Jung again, "It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.”

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Ray Bradbury, paraphrasing Yoda- "Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things."

Maybe they were all just ripping off the Roman poet Horace: "Don't just think, do."

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau- "People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

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Albert Einstein- "The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas."

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Larry McMurtry, Leaving Cheyenne- "But just let me tell you something, son, a woman's love is like the morning dew, it's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose. So you better just get over it."

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Dylan:

While one who sings with his tongue on fire

Gargles in the rat race choir

Bent out of shape from society’s pliers

Cares not to come up any higher

But rather get you down in the hole

That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault

On anyone that lives in a vault

But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Addendum:

1.

David Foster Wallace could have been killed in a tornado on this day in 1978. Tragically, he would accomplish the feat himself, almost exactly 30 years later. His tornado run-in was the fodder/catalyst for one of the greatest paragraphs in American literature. From Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:

The only time I ever got caught in what might have been an actual one was in June ’78 on a tennis court at Hessel Park in Champaign, where I was drilling one afternoon with Gil Antitoi. Though a contemptible and despised tournament opponent, I was a coveted practice partner because I could transfer balls to wherever you wanted them with the mindless constancy of a machine. This particular day it was supposed to rain around suppertime, and a couple times we thought we’d heard the tattered edges of a couple sirens out west toward Monticello, but Antitoi and I drilled religiously every afternoon that week on the slow clayish Har-Tru of Hessel, trying to prepare for a beastly clay invitational in Chicago where it was rumored both Brescia and Mees would appear. We were doing butterfly drills — my crosscourt forehand is transferred back down the line to Antitoi’s backhand, he crosscourts it to my backhand, I send it down the line to his forehand, four 45° angles, though the intersection of just his crosscourts make an X, which is four 90°s and also a crucifix rotated the same quarter-turn that a swastika (which involves eight 90° angles) is rotated on Hitlerian bunting. This was the sort of stuff that went through my head when I drilled. Hessel Park was scented heavily with cheese from the massive Kraft factory at Champaign’s western limit, and it had wonderful expensive soft Har-Tru courts of such a deep piney color that the flights of the fluorescent balls stayed on one’s visual screen for a few extra seconds, leaving trails, which is also why the angles and hieroglyphs involved in butterfly drill seem important. But the crux here is that butterflies are primarily a conditioning drill: both players have to get from one side of the court to the other between each stroke, and once the initial pain and wind-sucking are over — assuming you’re a kid who’s in absurd shape because he spends countless mindless hours jumping rope or running laps backward or doing star-drills between the court’s corners or straight sprints back and forth along the perfect furrows of early beanfields each morning — once the first pain and fatigue of butterflies are got through, if both guys are good enough so that there are few unforced errors to break up the rally, a kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide (you have to slide out of a run on Har-Tru) and whatever’s outside the lines of the court, and pretty much all you know then is the bright ball and the octangled butterfly outline of its trail across the billiard green of the court. We had one just endless rally and I’d left the planet in a silent swoop inside when the court and ball and butterfly trail all seemed to surge brightly and glow as the daylight just plain went out in the sky overhead. Neither of us had noticed that there’d been no wind blowing the familiar grit into our eyes for several minutes — a bad sign. There was no siren. Later they said the C.D. alert network had been out of order. This was June 6, 1978. The air temperature dropped so fast you could feel your hairs rise. There was no thunder and no air stirred. I could not tell you why we kept hitting. Neither of us said anything. There was no siren. It was high noon; there was nobody else on the courts. The riding mower out over east at the Softball field was still going back and forth. There were no depressions except a saprogenic ditch along the field of new corn just west. What could we have done? The air always smells of mowed grass before a bad storm. I think we thought it would rain at worst and that we’d play till it rained and then go sit in Antitoi’s parents’ station wagon. I do remember a mental obscenity — I had gut strings in my rackets, strings everybody with a high sectional ranking got free for letting the Wilson sales rep spray-paint a W across the racket face, so they were free, but I liked this particular string job on this racket, I liked them tight but not real tight, 62–63 p.s.i. on a Proflite stringer, and gut becomes pasta if it gets wet, but we were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I’ve decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt it, wear it down. Then the whole knee-high field to the west along Kirby Avenue all of a sudden flattened out in a wave coming toward us as if the field was getting steamrolled. Antitoi went wide west for a forehand cross and I saw the corn get laid down in waves and the sycamores in a copse lining the ditch point our way. There was no funnel. Either it had just materialized and come down or it wasn’t a real one. The big heavy swings on the industrial swingsets took off, wrapping themselves in their chains around and around the top crossbar; the park’s grass got laid down the same way the field had; the whole thing happened so fast I’d seen nothing like it; recall that Bi-mini H-Bomb film of the shock wave visible in the sea as it comes toward the ship’s film crew. This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like the lift of the world’s biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I’d just hit, but I couldn’t have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at 45°, Antitoi detached a retina and had to wear those funky Jabbar retina-goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons where the guy’s face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him, two catcher’s masks offence, we both got deep quadrangular lines impressed on our faces, torsos, legs’ fronts, from the fence, my sister said we looked like waffles, but neither of us got badly hurt, and no homes got whacked — either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after, they do that, obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something that might as well be will, or else it wasn’t a real one. Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.

2.

Myspace Blog 

June 6, 2006

The Cleanest Rest Stop in PA

At 9:30 PM I somehow found the strength within myself to avoid the harpies of the Meadville Quality Inn and blaze ahead road warrior style to finish my route before turning in for the night. You see, Dear Reader, I'm the guy that replenishes the travel brochures at all of the interstate rest stops in PA.

The job suits my personality. As I drive between stops I usually have an hour or two to let my mind wander. But mental freedom like that comes with a price. Today I couldn't get a certain thought out of my head. It just wouldn't leave. This is the thought: Everyone with a redneck voice that voted, voted for Bush. Occasionally it morphed into my mind's impersonation of a redneck saying "I voted for Bush," but it was more like "Ah voted fir Boo-ish." How do they squeeze "Bush" hard enough to get two syllables out of it? Over and over, "Ah voted fir Boo-ish. Ah voted fir Boo-ish." I asked the thought to leave. It wouldn't. It was an unwelcome guest.

Not only do I get to let my mind wander while I'm on the road, I usually get to let my mind wander while I'm working, although filling brochure racks takes just a bit more concentration. Occasionally a rest stop worker will talk to me but I like it best when I'm free to listen in on other people's conversations and watch them going about their daily business.

Tonight I was not left to myself. Immediately the janitor came over and started making some chit chat. And there it was in all its glory, the redneck voice. This late I just want to get done, find a hotel, and go to bed, but instead I have to continue to be haunted by the voice that haunted me all day. Usually I can "yeah" and "really?" and "I know" my way through these conversations but he wouldn't let me. He kept asking questions. I decided to make the most of it. And it turned out he was a really interesting guy.

He'd been a farmer his whole life until he got "runned over by a tractor." He suffered nerve damage and was in a lot of pain for years so he had to sell the farm (but at least he didn't buy it.) We talked about hard work and with a childlike gleam in his eye he told me that his rest stop was voted the cleanest in the state... and all of the other workers at that rest stop agreed that he should have the award. His pride was obvious. He told me it's so clean because he does a lot of things he shouldn't do. Then he quietly waited, prompting me to inquire.

Me- Like what?

Him- Promise you won't tell?

Me- Yeah.

Him- I get up on a ladder and wax the rafters.

I looked up. The wooden rafters were immaculate. Was this a rest stop or Lincoln"s Cabin National Historic Site?

Him- We're not allowed to get up on a ladder by ourselves. The boss told me that if I fall, I should crawl outside and get someone to put the ladder away. I stand up there on the soda machines and wash the windows. If I fall back behind them and die nobody will find me until I start stinking.

We laughed. It was a good time.

He told me he heard a rumor that they were closing down a welcome center and said that they probably couldn't afford to pay the workers $15 dollars an hour anymore. I was silent. I wondered what he would think if he knew that I made $15 an hour. Picking up on my silence he said, "Yeah welcome center workers don't make $6 an hour like us guys." I didn't consider breaking the old boy's heart.

Then he said something that made my ears perk up. "We were up for a raise last year but the republicans voted it down."

Could it be? Of course. A redneck-voiced rest stop worker isn't going to support the "rich get richer" republicans. I can't make a blanket generalization and judge people by the sound of their voice. What was I thinking?

A young couple had been deciding on what candy and soda to get for the last few minutes- a black guy and a white girl. They collected their final choices and left.

My new friend watched them and sighed as they exited. "Ah can't stand that. We get a lot of that around here." I wished that he was talking about their indecisiveness.

Is it an option to start punching my new friend in the face? Has that ever, in the history of the world, happened before? Friendship to fists in fifteen minutes. All I could muster was "That's never bothered me at all." Then silence between us.

I kept working, and thinking about how I could have said the same thing differently, more urgently. Ill consider different rebuttals for years, but my comment served its purpose- he knew my position and our conversation was over. He quietly checked the coin slots to see if the couple left behind any change. That thought won't leave me. He checked the slots for change.

His prejudices will never allow him to vote out the republicans, even if it meant he'd earn a living wage if he did. One thing you can say about him- he certainly has the courage of his convictions. He wouldn't want to live well if it meant selling out on the issues that are most important to him.

At least these guys are becoming marginalized. He's working the midnight shift at his spotless rest stop in the middle of nowhere. If you stop in I doubt you'll notice the cleanliness over the stench. It's either the rotting racist who finally fell from the top of the vending machines or just the lingering remnants of his rotten life.