I heard among some of my acquaintances loud harrumphs and tut tuts about how the Edward Kennedy funeral mass was just a huge excuse for excessive personality adulation and leftist political posturing.
Well yes.
As if we have never seen that sort of thing at every other funeral in Mormondom kulchur.
Kennedy’s funeral mass, broadcast live from Roxbury Massachusetts, reminds us that God commands all to worship him and that the publicans and the harlots will enter the Celestial Kingdom before the supposed believers —
providing the harlots and publicans believe in and use the atonement more than the supposed believers believe in and use the atonement.
The organ music at the end of the mass, the organ music heard on TV as the honor guard and pallbearers carried the Senator’s body from the basilica may be the greatest organ musical I have ever heard on live TV.
As to Kennedy himself, his Senate history is a mass of contradictions and ironies.
On the one hand, I really think he should have resigned the Senate when Mary Jo died in his car.
If the people of Massachusetts really did want to elect him Senator, then he should have stayed at most three terms. Massachusetts contains plenty of people who could serve brilliantly in the Senate. Somewhere in Massachusetts live other men or women who could strike deals and make the peace maybe as well as Kennedy did.
Kennedy should have resigned his senate seat last year so that Massachusetts and the United States Senate had a senator in place for the tumultuous days ahead.
On the other hand, the great come once in a lifetime. Someone told Ted that he and Daniel Webster were the two greatest senators in history, and Ted said without no irony, “What did Daniel do?”
Indeed. Webster spoke brilliantly, but the United States was a tiny place in those days. The Senate did not do much or even meet much by today’s standards of activity. How great is a great man in a tiny institution??
Perhaps maybe The Great do have a responsibility to stay on and service us on and on and on.
Daniel Webster.
Henry Clay.
John Calhoun. '
Robert LaFollette, senior and junior.
Hiram Johnson.
Edward Kennedy.
Goodbye sweet prince. Thank you for your service.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
IN MEMORIAM EDWARD KENNEDY 1932 -- 2009
Edward Kennedy has been around for so long and has been so visible for so long that when he died on Tuesday, I for one felt as if someone in my family had died.
Edward was The Great Kennedy. His father was something of a political shark, a political blathersnake with the moral compass of a tank. His brother John’s public career spanned a short period of 1947 to 1963. His brother Robert’s career spanned an even shorter period of 1961 to 1968. Edward Kennedy served in public life from 1962 to 2009 -- and there are not many of that vintage still around. Only Robert Byrd now comes to mind.
Conventional wisdom, which is usually neither, holds that Kennedy was a slacker of a senator until around 1970 - 1972, and then transformed into The Great Legislator after his presidential campaign of 1980 failed. There might be a kernel of truth to that, but not a lot. Kennedy had good legislative instincts even as a youngster.
Most people cannot give you the names of a half dozen senators, but Kennedy was instantly recognizable, the great superstar senator of our time. He was also easy to parody with his weatherbeaten Irish look and sound and the most famous head of hair in political life. The "mayor of Springfield" in The Simpsons was a particularly funny parody of him. After the 1991 Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas confrontation before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Murphy Brown did a particularly memorable satire of the committee. Both Murphy and Corky Sherwood had to testify before a sitcom Judiciary Committee of caricatures; the Kennedy caricature could not say anything that wasn’t a sexual double entendre. "Senator Batson D Belfry" in the comic strip Shoe was another obvious caricature that had elements of both Tip O’Neill and Edward Kennedy. When Belfry ran for the presidency in 1984, he noted wryly: “I have a voter identity problem. Too damn many people know who I am.” “A Verb senator, we need a verb,” a reporter in the comic strip Doonesbury once yelled at Gary Trudeau’s version of Kennedy.
I found Kennedy a particularly appealing political figure. He cut a princely figure on Capitol Hill. He held an entire constellation of instantly recognizable political ideals and he lived his ideals. He spoke clearly and brilliantly; just like his famous orator-brother Jack. He contained the most rock solid integrity of any senator of that period. You knew where he stood on the issues of the day.
Conservatives always referred to him as the great hiss and a byword of his generation, but it was Kennedy who mastered bipartisan Senate work. Orrin Hatch was not the only Republican that liked him and worked with him.
Some conservative Utahns never forgave Orrin Hatch for befriending Kennedy, and others couldn’t understand that they liked each other – but they don't understand the emotional workings of friendship. The friendship of Ted and Orrin was completely understandable and followed several predictable patterns. Kennedy had lots of charm and Hatch lots of character. It was a friendship made in heaven – a classic example of opposites attracting – the Wally and Eddie of Capitol Hill. Conservatives on principle and liberals on principle have more in common with each other than they have in common with the apolitical and all the moderates around them. Most senators had no more moral sense than a cat and came and went without influencing Kennedy and Hatch in the slightest.
John Kennedy liked Utah enough to visit Utah several times both as a senator and president. He gave a major address in the Salt Lake Tabernacle a few weeks before he died. Robert Kennedy visited Utah as well and actually spoke at Brigham Young University. Even though most political Utahns abhorred him, Edward Kennedy visited Utah on many occasions. In 1974, he visited Spencer W. Kimball at which visit President Kimball told him with a completely straight face that Catholics make great Mormons.
Ronald Reagan used to hold up Kennedy as the poster boy of tax and spend, but the fact remains Kennedy on occasion supported Reagan’s political initiatives just as he supported some of Nixon’s and some of Bushs’ initiatives. Ronald and Nancy liked Ted and Vickie on a personal level.
Peggy Noonan tells an interesting story that in the days when she served on the Great Communicator’s Speech Writing Staff she got the opportunity to write a speech for Reagan that he gave at a fund raiser for the Kennedy Library. Reagan speaking in behalf of money raising for the Kennedy library was not out of character. Both Reagan and Kennedy were great cold warriors, brilliant speakers, and basically moderate in political instincts at heart. “Typical of Ronnie,” Noonan noted without a shred of irony, “that he willingly showed up and spoke at his competitors’ blood drive.” Reagan’s talk that night was a big hit: he was warm and witty and Jacqueline thought he had captured the essence of her husband. Edward wrote him a gracious letter of thanks for that memorable speech.
Politics in the middle of the Twentieth Century was full of chance both good and bad, and the Kennedys sat at the heart of the political crap game.
Would Joseph Junior have won in politics had he lived to see the peace?
Would Robert or Edward have won the presidency had Jack died as a youngster or in battle in the War of the Pacific?
If Oswald had not assassinated Jack, would he have gotten embroiled in the Vietnam War? If Oswald had not killed Jack, would Jack have died of his diseases in office?
Would Edward or Robert have gotten embroiled in the Vietnam War if either one of them had been elected president in 1960 or 1964 or 1968?
If Nixon had been elected president in 1960, would he have gotten swallowed up the Vietnam Mess?
If Edward had not allowed Mary Jo to drown in his car, if Edward had actually taken some initiative to try and save her, would Edward have been elected president?
If he had been elected president, would he have been any good? -- given that his personality was more senatorial than executive.
John Kennedy, Peggy Noonan wrote for Ronald Reagan to say at that library fundraiser, was a man of the most interesting contradictions. That is a good way to characterize Edward Kennedy. His was the most spectacular senate career of the era, but it should not have happened.
He should have resigned his senate seat after Mary Jo died in his car.
'
He shouldn’t have held onto his senate seat like the papacy either. Three terms top.
Massachusetts has plenty of interesting political possibilities. Heaven only knows who could have been a great senator from the Land of the Bean and the Cod but couldn’t get in because Kennedy and most of the other senators of the twentieth century held their seats more or less forever. Lodges. Saltensall. Kerry. Kennedy. Double digits.
The Kennedys were not the greatest political family of the age. That distinction belongs mostly for bad to the Bush Family. The Kennedys were not the greatest political family of Massachusetts either. That honor still belongs to the Adams Family. Edward Kennedy, however, was a great senator for good and bad. We will miss him, if only because we won’t have him to kick around anymore.
AND REMEMBER:
Any senator can be a bipartisan workhorse if he or she works at it.
Edward was The Great Kennedy. His father was something of a political shark, a political blathersnake with the moral compass of a tank. His brother John’s public career spanned a short period of 1947 to 1963. His brother Robert’s career spanned an even shorter period of 1961 to 1968. Edward Kennedy served in public life from 1962 to 2009 -- and there are not many of that vintage still around. Only Robert Byrd now comes to mind.
Conventional wisdom, which is usually neither, holds that Kennedy was a slacker of a senator until around 1970 - 1972, and then transformed into The Great Legislator after his presidential campaign of 1980 failed. There might be a kernel of truth to that, but not a lot. Kennedy had good legislative instincts even as a youngster.
Most people cannot give you the names of a half dozen senators, but Kennedy was instantly recognizable, the great superstar senator of our time. He was also easy to parody with his weatherbeaten Irish look and sound and the most famous head of hair in political life. The "mayor of Springfield" in The Simpsons was a particularly funny parody of him. After the 1991 Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas confrontation before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Murphy Brown did a particularly memorable satire of the committee. Both Murphy and Corky Sherwood had to testify before a sitcom Judiciary Committee of caricatures; the Kennedy caricature could not say anything that wasn’t a sexual double entendre. "Senator Batson D Belfry" in the comic strip Shoe was another obvious caricature that had elements of both Tip O’Neill and Edward Kennedy. When Belfry ran for the presidency in 1984, he noted wryly: “I have a voter identity problem. Too damn many people know who I am.” “A Verb senator, we need a verb,” a reporter in the comic strip Doonesbury once yelled at Gary Trudeau’s version of Kennedy.
I found Kennedy a particularly appealing political figure. He cut a princely figure on Capitol Hill. He held an entire constellation of instantly recognizable political ideals and he lived his ideals. He spoke clearly and brilliantly; just like his famous orator-brother Jack. He contained the most rock solid integrity of any senator of that period. You knew where he stood on the issues of the day.
Conservatives always referred to him as the great hiss and a byword of his generation, but it was Kennedy who mastered bipartisan Senate work. Orrin Hatch was not the only Republican that liked him and worked with him.
Some conservative Utahns never forgave Orrin Hatch for befriending Kennedy, and others couldn’t understand that they liked each other – but they don't understand the emotional workings of friendship. The friendship of Ted and Orrin was completely understandable and followed several predictable patterns. Kennedy had lots of charm and Hatch lots of character. It was a friendship made in heaven – a classic example of opposites attracting – the Wally and Eddie of Capitol Hill. Conservatives on principle and liberals on principle have more in common with each other than they have in common with the apolitical and all the moderates around them. Most senators had no more moral sense than a cat and came and went without influencing Kennedy and Hatch in the slightest.
John Kennedy liked Utah enough to visit Utah several times both as a senator and president. He gave a major address in the Salt Lake Tabernacle a few weeks before he died. Robert Kennedy visited Utah as well and actually spoke at Brigham Young University. Even though most political Utahns abhorred him, Edward Kennedy visited Utah on many occasions. In 1974, he visited Spencer W. Kimball at which visit President Kimball told him with a completely straight face that Catholics make great Mormons.
Ronald Reagan used to hold up Kennedy as the poster boy of tax and spend, but the fact remains Kennedy on occasion supported Reagan’s political initiatives just as he supported some of Nixon’s and some of Bushs’ initiatives. Ronald and Nancy liked Ted and Vickie on a personal level.
Peggy Noonan tells an interesting story that in the days when she served on the Great Communicator’s Speech Writing Staff she got the opportunity to write a speech for Reagan that he gave at a fund raiser for the Kennedy Library. Reagan speaking in behalf of money raising for the Kennedy library was not out of character. Both Reagan and Kennedy were great cold warriors, brilliant speakers, and basically moderate in political instincts at heart. “Typical of Ronnie,” Noonan noted without a shred of irony, “that he willingly showed up and spoke at his competitors’ blood drive.” Reagan’s talk that night was a big hit: he was warm and witty and Jacqueline thought he had captured the essence of her husband. Edward wrote him a gracious letter of thanks for that memorable speech.
Politics in the middle of the Twentieth Century was full of chance both good and bad, and the Kennedys sat at the heart of the political crap game.
Would Joseph Junior have won in politics had he lived to see the peace?
Would Robert or Edward have won the presidency had Jack died as a youngster or in battle in the War of the Pacific?
If Oswald had not assassinated Jack, would he have gotten embroiled in the Vietnam War? If Oswald had not killed Jack, would Jack have died of his diseases in office?
Would Edward or Robert have gotten embroiled in the Vietnam War if either one of them had been elected president in 1960 or 1964 or 1968?
If Nixon had been elected president in 1960, would he have gotten swallowed up the Vietnam Mess?
If Edward had not allowed Mary Jo to drown in his car, if Edward had actually taken some initiative to try and save her, would Edward have been elected president?
If he had been elected president, would he have been any good? -- given that his personality was more senatorial than executive.
John Kennedy, Peggy Noonan wrote for Ronald Reagan to say at that library fundraiser, was a man of the most interesting contradictions. That is a good way to characterize Edward Kennedy. His was the most spectacular senate career of the era, but it should not have happened.
He should have resigned his senate seat after Mary Jo died in his car.
'
He shouldn’t have held onto his senate seat like the papacy either. Three terms top.
Massachusetts has plenty of interesting political possibilities. Heaven only knows who could have been a great senator from the Land of the Bean and the Cod but couldn’t get in because Kennedy and most of the other senators of the twentieth century held their seats more or less forever. Lodges. Saltensall. Kerry. Kennedy. Double digits.
The Kennedys were not the greatest political family of the age. That distinction belongs mostly for bad to the Bush Family. The Kennedys were not the greatest political family of Massachusetts either. That honor still belongs to the Adams Family. Edward Kennedy, however, was a great senator for good and bad. We will miss him, if only because we won’t have him to kick around anymore.
AND REMEMBER:
Any senator can be a bipartisan workhorse if he or she works at it.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
GIVE UTAH BACK PLEASE -- FRANK TALK ABOUT EXPLOITING OUR RESOURCES
So when liberals gather up an unruly crowd it is "community organizing" and when conservatives gather up an unruly crowd it is a "mob?"
This is America -- he who gathers the biggest crowd wins.
The participants in 8 August’s Take Back Utah demonstration should understand for an average west coast or eastern Senator or Representative, voting to turn Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming into a wilderness rates as the sure-fire way to appear environmentally friendly without actually doing something that harms the economic interests of those region.
Concerning mining Utah's coal leases and drilling Utah's oil leases: It is true the proponents of biofuels have mislead the public. We need all the ground we can get to feed earthlings — not grow luxury fuels. It is also true that hydrogen cannot fuel our needs: we can’t store it safely and hydrogen take too much energy to produce. So we need coal and gas for the foreseeable future.
That said
both coal and oil are 19th century fuel technologies, if not earlier. Soon we will find replacements that work. We do not want Utah to be the 21st century West Virginia. Therefore, we should be careful not to tear up Utah’s gorgeous scenery for the short term profit of nineteenth century technology.
This is America -- he who gathers the biggest crowd wins.
The participants in 8 August’s Take Back Utah demonstration should understand for an average west coast or eastern Senator or Representative, voting to turn Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming into a wilderness rates as the sure-fire way to appear environmentally friendly without actually doing something that harms the economic interests of those region.
Concerning mining Utah's coal leases and drilling Utah's oil leases: It is true the proponents of biofuels have mislead the public. We need all the ground we can get to feed earthlings — not grow luxury fuels. It is also true that hydrogen cannot fuel our needs: we can’t store it safely and hydrogen take too much energy to produce. So we need coal and gas for the foreseeable future.
That said
both coal and oil are 19th century fuel technologies, if not earlier. Soon we will find replacements that work. We do not want Utah to be the 21st century West Virginia. Therefore, we should be careful not to tear up Utah’s gorgeous scenery for the short term profit of nineteenth century technology.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
HATCH, SOTOMAYOR AND THE SENATE CAMPAIGN OF 2012
Here is a copy of my letter to the public forum in the Salt Lake Tribune, which some comments:
Latina instead of Hatch
Public Forum Letter
Updated: 07/30/2009 05:07:13 PM MDT
Sen. Orrin Hatch will not vote for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ("Hatch explains Sotomayor vote," Tribune , July 28). He voted yea for the Supreme Court nominations of Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and it is hard to imagine how Sotomayor can possibly evolve into a justice more liberal than they.
Sotomayor has years of experience in law and in the courts. She certainly comes with more experience than Justice Clarence Thomas had in 1991, not to mention Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Hatch enthusiastically voted in favor of all of them.
Hatch complains that Sotomayor is soft on the Second Amendment. How useful is that amendment? Yet all one has to say is [ a candidate does ] not support the right to kill and that ends the nomination discussion. Never mind her other qualifications.
[ Conservatives complained about her comment that a wise experienced Latina would make sounder decisions than your typical white professional male. ] The time has come for Utah voters to find a good, wise, experienced, Latina woman and elect her to the Senate in 2012 instead of Orrin Hatch.
Latina instead of Hatch
Public Forum Letter
Updated: 07/30/2009 05:07:13 PM MDT
Sen. Orrin Hatch will not vote for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ("Hatch explains Sotomayor vote," Tribune , July 28). He voted yea for the Supreme Court nominations of Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and it is hard to imagine how Sotomayor can possibly evolve into a justice more liberal than they.
Sotomayor has years of experience in law and in the courts. She certainly comes with more experience than Justice Clarence Thomas had in 1991, not to mention Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Hatch enthusiastically voted in favor of all of them.
Hatch complains that Sotomayor is soft on the Second Amendment. How useful is that amendment? Yet all one has to say is [ a candidate does ] not support the right to kill and that ends the nomination discussion. Never mind her other qualifications.
[ Conservatives complained about her comment that a wise experienced Latina would make sounder decisions than your typical white professional male. ] The time has come for Utah voters to find a good, wise, experienced, Latina woman and elect her to the Senate in 2012 instead of Orrin Hatch.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
QUO VADIS PALINI: or GET THEE BEHIND ME SARAH
26 July -- Sarah Palin resigns as governor of Alaska and gives the thankless job to Sean Parnell, who certainly has his work cut out for him post-Palin.
The question remains as to just exactly how many real friends this woman has, and if she can find any of them in her family. If I were Bristol Palin, I would be so ticked at her mama. Thanks to the way her mother handled Bristol's situation, people will tend to remember Bristol now as the most famous poster girl for unwed redneck mothers -- ever. And the father left her to fend for herself as well. Smart boy. I doubt that her family like her much after all the horrors she required them to endure for the sake of her political ego.
If I were Palin, I would not in the long view count John McCain as a real friend. He took her from Juneau up to the mountain top and showed her the Kingdoms of the World, not really out of friendship but as some sort of political stunt. Many vice presidential candidates have started as stunts and wound up as vice presidents – but not Palin.
As a stunt, she takes herself way too seriously as a conservative commodity. Unfortunately for Alaska, her experience as a campaign star ruined her as a governor. The minutia of governing a place as big and tedious and dull (from a sophisticate point of view) as Northern Exposure obviously bored her after November 2008.
The history of the American presidency is a long history of sweet-talking, charismatic wise-guys with sharp tongues and the gift of gab convincing the yokels to elect him President of the United States after a couple of years of political experience, usually in California or New York. I find it hard to take Palin seriously as the latest incarnation of this model of leader,
For starters she ran – badly – a state that has less people than a third of the counties of California. I will admit for the sake of fairness that she does not need to shoulder all the responsibility for her dismal leadership record. Any governor finds Alaska hard to lead or even manage. The feds situated the capital in the south east corner of the state: the dullest corner, too. Imagine the entire Confederacy as one state with its capitol in Hialeah. However, other governors have done splendidly under the circumstances and did not bail before the end of the term.
Next, her performances as a politician leaves much to be desired. She entertains if not convinces the converted, but who else exactly takes her seriously for more than a minute and a half at a stretch? Compare her to the Roosevelts (all three of them) or Thatcher or Reagan. They could articulate themselves well enough to attract converts among people who may not have actually liked them. Palin cannot claim Inexperience as an excuse. Reagan could persuade even in his younger years – he served as a successful influential union president, corporate spokesman, and political commentator when young. Furthermore, all those presidents and presidential candidates who ran after one term or part of a term as governor of New York or California did not resign because of boredom and bad karma. Someone should tell Sarah if you ain’t for bad karma, you ain’t for American politics.
Since Palin got to see much of the lower forty eight last year, I suspect that she will move somewhere on the mainland soon. Some place with warmth, no glaciers, palm trees --- and a big base of electoral college votes.
The question remains as to just exactly how many real friends this woman has, and if she can find any of them in her family. If I were Bristol Palin, I would be so ticked at her mama. Thanks to the way her mother handled Bristol's situation, people will tend to remember Bristol now as the most famous poster girl for unwed redneck mothers -- ever. And the father left her to fend for herself as well. Smart boy. I doubt that her family like her much after all the horrors she required them to endure for the sake of her political ego.
If I were Palin, I would not in the long view count John McCain as a real friend. He took her from Juneau up to the mountain top and showed her the Kingdoms of the World, not really out of friendship but as some sort of political stunt. Many vice presidential candidates have started as stunts and wound up as vice presidents – but not Palin.
As a stunt, she takes herself way too seriously as a conservative commodity. Unfortunately for Alaska, her experience as a campaign star ruined her as a governor. The minutia of governing a place as big and tedious and dull (from a sophisticate point of view) as Northern Exposure obviously bored her after November 2008.
The history of the American presidency is a long history of sweet-talking, charismatic wise-guys with sharp tongues and the gift of gab convincing the yokels to elect him President of the United States after a couple of years of political experience, usually in California or New York. I find it hard to take Palin seriously as the latest incarnation of this model of leader,
For starters she ran – badly – a state that has less people than a third of the counties of California. I will admit for the sake of fairness that she does not need to shoulder all the responsibility for her dismal leadership record. Any governor finds Alaska hard to lead or even manage. The feds situated the capital in the south east corner of the state: the dullest corner, too. Imagine the entire Confederacy as one state with its capitol in Hialeah. However, other governors have done splendidly under the circumstances and did not bail before the end of the term.
Next, her performances as a politician leaves much to be desired. She entertains if not convinces the converted, but who else exactly takes her seriously for more than a minute and a half at a stretch? Compare her to the Roosevelts (all three of them) or Thatcher or Reagan. They could articulate themselves well enough to attract converts among people who may not have actually liked them. Palin cannot claim Inexperience as an excuse. Reagan could persuade even in his younger years – he served as a successful influential union president, corporate spokesman, and political commentator when young. Furthermore, all those presidents and presidential candidates who ran after one term or part of a term as governor of New York or California did not resign because of boredom and bad karma. Someone should tell Sarah if you ain’t for bad karma, you ain’t for American politics.
Since Palin got to see much of the lower forty eight last year, I suspect that she will move somewhere on the mainland soon. Some place with warmth, no glaciers, palm trees --- and a big base of electoral college votes.
BYU SOBER: BINGE CULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES
BYU is soberest in nation — again
Make it an even dozen.
For the 12th year in a row, Brigham Young University has claimed the title of the most stone-cold sober school in the nation.
No other school has come close to that kind of dominating performance in any category, said Rob Franek, editorial director for the Princeton Review's annual survey of the nation's universities, this year titled "The Best 371 Colleges: 2010 edition," which goes on sale Tuesday.
The rankings are based on a survey of 122,000 students at the 371 colleges.
"Brigham Young has had such exceptional longevity on this list and other lists," Franek said. "There has been no other school with this kind of longevity."
BYU spokesman Michael Smart, with tongue in cheek, said the university doesn't intend to rest on its laurels.
"I'll borrow from the world's football coaches and say that we are happy but we are not satisfied," he said. "This year, like very other year, we will take it one day at a time and hopefully this time next year we'll be talking about number 13."
In fact, BYU ranked first in five of the 62 different categories in this year's survey, including "Don't Inhale," a ranking of low marijuana use, and "Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution,"
BYU ranked second in "Most Religious Students," behind Thomas Aquinas College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Santa Paula, Calif., fourth in "Most Conservative Students" and seventh in low acceptance of gay students.
BYU's Harold B. Lee Library was ranked 16th among college libraries, and the university is ranked 20th for student participation in intramural sports. Notre Dame ranked first.
Two other Utah schools made the rankings.
Westminster College ranked 12th for "Best Quality of Life," and the University of Utah ranked 20th for "Most Religious Students."
Penn State University earned the distinction of "Top Party School" and Bennington College in Vermont was ranked "Least Religious Students."
Franek said the lists are designed to help potential college students pick out the university that best fits their personality.
"The ranking lists should be information to students, family and guidance counselors," he said.
Other student survey-based ranking lists in the book reveal the schools at which students most highly rated their administrators, campus career centers, and athletic facilities.
The ratings for both stone-cold sober and party schools are based on students' answers to the same questions about the use of alcohol and drugs, the number of hours they study each day outside of class, and the popularity of fraternities/sororities at their school. BYU has no fraternities or sororities.
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
Over the years, a number of my neighbors served as bishops in BYU Singles Wards, so I have heard their stories about how much alcohol the boys and girls consume under cover of orthodox respectability. I have taught for ages at what is now Utah Valley University, so I know that its reputation as a party school is widely exaggerated -- especially compared to the exalted standards of sophistication found in State College, Gainesville and Oxford.
The report relays inaccurate about BYU's not having sororities and fraternities. It has Relief Society and the Priesthood.
It must be an awful shock to the U of U to make the top 20 in religious students. The secular humanists have let their guards down!
Universities and colleges have always promoted unhealthy environments, and despite all the pretensions toward health centers and wellness clinics, colleges still have unhealthy climates.
Start with all those students many of whom have the hygiene habits of dogs and toads.
Next universities overload their students with fat curriculums and work, and then try to cram it all down the students in 4 years.
College life revolves around binging –
Binge studying.
Binge eating.
Binge sleeping after binge studying.
Binge sex when you can get it.
Binge drug use – over the counter, supplements, prescriptions, illegals, designers.
Intense binge drinking with the goal of falling down unconsciousness quick.
Entirely too many students do not think of beer as drug abuse because it supposedly goes so well with pizza. But drug abuse it is.
RIGHT ASCENSION RAISES THE GLASS OF CANADA DRY.
Congratulations to BYU for showing the way to square and cool.
Monday, July 27, 2009
IF UTAH DOES NOT WANT A FEDERAL HEALTH INSURANCE, THEN THE LEGISLATURE SHOULD ACT INSTEAD OF TALK
We hear Utahns complain all around us that they do not want a federal government health care program. Utah’s government leaders have so far distributed their own weight in words on the subject.
Utah’s government should stop talking and act to bring the force of law into health care reformation.
RIGHT ASCENSION'S CALL TO ACTION
I urge the legislature to pass laws mandating that insurance companies doing business in Utah must pay for
1. Mental health treatments. The brain is just another organ in the body and should get equal access to health care.
2. Allopathic, Ayurvedic, Chinese, Chiropractic, and Osteopathic medicines. If it works for patients, then insurance should pay the doctors.
3. dental treatments
4. preventative health care treatments.
5. the design of one standardized set of forms for all insurance companies doing business in Utah.
I urge the legislature to pass laws mandating insurance companies cannot --
6. make profits. They should pay for health care and employee salaries where the highest salaries can only range 20 times higher than the slowest salaries.
7. cancel a policy except for any deliberate lie on the application form.
Utah’s government should stop talking and act to bring the force of law into health care reformation.
RIGHT ASCENSION'S CALL TO ACTION
I urge the legislature to pass laws mandating that insurance companies doing business in Utah must pay for
1. Mental health treatments. The brain is just another organ in the body and should get equal access to health care.
2. Allopathic, Ayurvedic, Chinese, Chiropractic, and Osteopathic medicines. If it works for patients, then insurance should pay the doctors.
3. dental treatments
4. preventative health care treatments.
5. the design of one standardized set of forms for all insurance companies doing business in Utah.
I urge the legislature to pass laws mandating insurance companies cannot --
6. make profits. They should pay for health care and employee salaries where the highest salaries can only range 20 times higher than the slowest salaries.
7. cancel a policy except for any deliberate lie on the application form.
THE SECOND AMENDMENT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Senator Hatch will not vote for Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. He complains Sotomayor is soft on the Second Amendment. How useful is that amendment. All one has to say is someone does not support The Right to Kill, and that ends the nomination discussion. Never mind her other qualifications.
The Second Amendment proved useful in the 1790s when the USA had few small militias with primitive weapons and no urban police forces.
RIGHT ASCENSION'S CALL TO ACTION
Nowadays the Second Amendment causes more problems than it prevents. Congress should abolish The Second Amendment and replace it with four Constitutional amendments for the 21st Century:
1. An amendment guaranteeing a person’s right to self defense against danger.
2. An amendment clearly stating Congress should fund a national military and the president executive should serve as commander in chief to control the national military.
3 An amendment clearly banning and outlawing private armies in America.
4. An amendment allowing states to have national guards with weapons.
The Second Amendment proved useful in the 1790s when the USA had few small militias with primitive weapons and no urban police forces.
RIGHT ASCENSION'S CALL TO ACTION
Nowadays the Second Amendment causes more problems than it prevents. Congress should abolish The Second Amendment and replace it with four Constitutional amendments for the 21st Century:
1. An amendment guaranteeing a person’s right to self defense against danger.
2. An amendment clearly stating Congress should fund a national military and the president executive should serve as commander in chief to control the national military.
3 An amendment clearly banning and outlawing private armies in America.
4. An amendment allowing states to have national guards with weapons.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
TEMPLE AT DAYBREAK
Daybreak Utah contains some of the prettiest neighborhoods I have seen in Salt Lake Valley. The homes are right out of the 1930s, and the owners and designers do not shy away from painting the Hardiplank in primary colors.
The temple at Daybreak features a facade covered in a Chinese granite of a beige tan almost brown cream color. Not white mind you, like the Draper Temple or the Jordan River Temple, both of which are visible from the front porch on the east. I liked the facade a lot.
Speaking of the front porch on the east -- it must have a night view of the Salt Lake Valley to behold. For those who know where to look -- Mount Nebo appears to the south, then Santaquin Peak, then Spanish Fork Peak, then the tip of Cascade Peak, then an impressive view of the northwest face of Mount Timpanogos. Box Elder Peak is visible if one knows where to look for it, and then Lone Peak, then the various mountains of the Salt Lake Valley that I don't know by name. The mountains in Davis and Weber County loom to the north.
This marks the first time I have visited one of the new rectangular modern temples based on the old Saint George Temple shape or the London Temple shape. The floor plan has at least two and maybe four staircases that keep the foot traffic moving. It also contains a two story central atrium complete with chandelier and double hallways on both floors. I liked looking at it, but I don't quite know if it constitutes an efficient use of space.
I adore crystal chandeliers, though I do not like to clean them. The chandeliers in this temple combine the shapes of a double star of David, an iceberg, and icicles all together.
The World Rooms in this temple contain murals of vistas high up in the Oquirrh Mountains complete with cougars, moose, deer, bears, and babbling brooks so realistic one can just about hear them.
ASIDE -- I wonder if the World Rooms murals in the Vancouver Temple will have pirates in False Bay and drug dealers in Gastown. I also wonder if the World Room murals in the Rome Temple will have the Vatican in the distance and hookers plying their trades on the Piazza d Popolo. Now there's wildlife. It's a shame Minerva Teichert isn't alive to take those World Room mural assignments.
Brethren, we know we will have achieved equality when they build temples with Groom's rooms in them.
The temple at Daybreak features a facade covered in a Chinese granite of a beige tan almost brown cream color. Not white mind you, like the Draper Temple or the Jordan River Temple, both of which are visible from the front porch on the east. I liked the facade a lot.
Speaking of the front porch on the east -- it must have a night view of the Salt Lake Valley to behold. For those who know where to look -- Mount Nebo appears to the south, then Santaquin Peak, then Spanish Fork Peak, then the tip of Cascade Peak, then an impressive view of the northwest face of Mount Timpanogos. Box Elder Peak is visible if one knows where to look for it, and then Lone Peak, then the various mountains of the Salt Lake Valley that I don't know by name. The mountains in Davis and Weber County loom to the north.
This marks the first time I have visited one of the new rectangular modern temples based on the old Saint George Temple shape or the London Temple shape. The floor plan has at least two and maybe four staircases that keep the foot traffic moving. It also contains a two story central atrium complete with chandelier and double hallways on both floors. I liked looking at it, but I don't quite know if it constitutes an efficient use of space.
I adore crystal chandeliers, though I do not like to clean them. The chandeliers in this temple combine the shapes of a double star of David, an iceberg, and icicles all together.
The World Rooms in this temple contain murals of vistas high up in the Oquirrh Mountains complete with cougars, moose, deer, bears, and babbling brooks so realistic one can just about hear them.
ASIDE -- I wonder if the World Rooms murals in the Vancouver Temple will have pirates in False Bay and drug dealers in Gastown. I also wonder if the World Room murals in the Rome Temple will have the Vatican in the distance and hookers plying their trades on the Piazza d Popolo. Now there's wildlife. It's a shame Minerva Teichert isn't alive to take those World Room mural assignments.
Brethren, we know we will have achieved equality when they build temples with Groom's rooms in them.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
THINKING OF MARY JO AND TED -- 40 YEAR ANNIVERSARY
Brookline, MASSACHUSETTS: As the Senators wrangle and posture over the controversies surrounding nationalized health care. Senator Kennedy stays home, dying for all we know. Kennedy has worked on various health care issues for ages, but now his health, ironically enough, does not allow him to participate in the political debates.
Saturday 18 July -- We remembers the 40th anniversary of an incident that reduced and clouded Edward Kennedy’s influence for decades. Some local media news outlets reported on this anniversary, but the national news organizations by and large simply ignored the anniversary, maybe out of respect to the dying senator.
On 18 July 1969, Kennedy attended a party at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts and took a girl other than his wife on a car ride at which the girl drowned in the car in an estuary. Kennedy’s detractors claim he had sexual contact with her and drove drunk. Kennedy denied both accusations, but frankly the story does not make much sense without either sex or liquor. The senator obviously survived. Supposedly the Senator made an attempt to save her but could not. The question as to why he could not remains to this day a big mystery, especially if the senator did not suffer the effects of alcohol.
Suppose If I had been in this sort of position: the dictates of law and of humanity would require me to phone the police as soon as possible. Kennedy did not contact the police first. First, he got political advice from his retainers – and they gave him really rather bad advise. Their advise and Kennedy’s inclinations were both so bad that Kennedy did not report the accident at all and did not talk to police for HOURS plural after the wreck. Only when locals discovered the wreck the next day did Kennedy talk to the police. And apparently, he never apologized to the family of the dead girl either.
A Massachusetts court did find the Senator guilty of some sort of vehicular negligence, but this being Massachusetts the court gave the minimum sentence possible (a couple of months) then suspended it.
This sort of death incident remains utterly unique in the history of the modern United States Senate. No other senator had somebody die accidentally in his care in his car or in his anything else.
Senator Kennedy should have resigned from the Senate, period. In July and August 1969, the Kennedys and their advisers all suffered sufficiently from delusion and denial to believe that Edward's taking full and complete responsibility for his actions was a secondary consideration to his political aspirations. This is the only way to reconcile the Senator’s words and actions in this period. As a political analyst in the PBS documentary The Kennedys observed, quite rightly, the advise Edward got proved bad advise all the way around.
The voters of Massachusetts do not cross the Kennedys – ever. So they found themselves under the obligations of holding their noses and reelecting Edward Kennedy over and over and over. Senators, who as a group do not obsess much at all over moral and ethical implications, think highly of him, and he earned his reputation in the Senate as a result of long years of work and service. The fact is – Kennedy’s long career should have never happened. His career in the Senate should have ended in July 1969 at the conviction.
Those who teach that moral agency implies one can choose to act as he wants, but one has to take responsibility for the consequences along with the consequences should study Edward Kennedy’s life closely. He illustrates that for many people, the concept is simply bogus. The accident kept him from the Presidency of the United States, but that is really about it. He didn’t lose his political career in the Senate, he did not go to jail, he did not have to pay reparations.
In August 1968, some leaders in the Democratic party came together to see if they could make a deal at the Convention to get Edward Kennedy nominated president – or barring that, vice president. Eventually, and eventually is the right word because Kennedy showed some interest in the idea, Kennedy withdrew from the idea, but in his heart of hearts (as so well expressed in The American Melodrama, “Kennedy in his heart of hearts did not turn down the presidency. He took a rain check on it.”
Suppose what could have happened if Kennedy had just taken the girl back to her hotel without incident. I cannot imagine how the Democrats in 1972 or in 1976 would have taken McGovern, Humphrey, Wallace, and Carter seriously if they had the real possibility of Edward Kennedy unspotted. Nixon possessed so-so popularity with voters in 1968 and 1972, especially considering how he managed to take an unpopular un-winnable Vietnam War and keep it going for four years.
Kennedy did run for president in 1980. Unlike his brother Robert, he had to oppose the President from beginning to end. Furthermore, his candidacy sat under the cloud of the accident, only an 11 year memory then. The Democrats did not really like Carter, but they couldn’t bring themselves to disloyalty for the sake of Kennedy spotted.
Kennedy as a result became an entity with a lot of potential that was either untapped or unwanted. He made his situation. a situation not inevitable.
THE MORAL TO THE STORY
Have someone with you when you take a girl other than your wife home.
Saturday 18 July -- We remembers the 40th anniversary of an incident that reduced and clouded Edward Kennedy’s influence for decades. Some local media news outlets reported on this anniversary, but the national news organizations by and large simply ignored the anniversary, maybe out of respect to the dying senator.
On 18 July 1969, Kennedy attended a party at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts and took a girl other than his wife on a car ride at which the girl drowned in the car in an estuary. Kennedy’s detractors claim he had sexual contact with her and drove drunk. Kennedy denied both accusations, but frankly the story does not make much sense without either sex or liquor. The senator obviously survived. Supposedly the Senator made an attempt to save her but could not. The question as to why he could not remains to this day a big mystery, especially if the senator did not suffer the effects of alcohol.
Suppose If I had been in this sort of position: the dictates of law and of humanity would require me to phone the police as soon as possible. Kennedy did not contact the police first. First, he got political advice from his retainers – and they gave him really rather bad advise. Their advise and Kennedy’s inclinations were both so bad that Kennedy did not report the accident at all and did not talk to police for HOURS plural after the wreck. Only when locals discovered the wreck the next day did Kennedy talk to the police. And apparently, he never apologized to the family of the dead girl either.
A Massachusetts court did find the Senator guilty of some sort of vehicular negligence, but this being Massachusetts the court gave the minimum sentence possible (a couple of months) then suspended it.
This sort of death incident remains utterly unique in the history of the modern United States Senate. No other senator had somebody die accidentally in his care in his car or in his anything else.
Senator Kennedy should have resigned from the Senate, period. In July and August 1969, the Kennedys and their advisers all suffered sufficiently from delusion and denial to believe that Edward's taking full and complete responsibility for his actions was a secondary consideration to his political aspirations. This is the only way to reconcile the Senator’s words and actions in this period. As a political analyst in the PBS documentary The Kennedys observed, quite rightly, the advise Edward got proved bad advise all the way around.
The voters of Massachusetts do not cross the Kennedys – ever. So they found themselves under the obligations of holding their noses and reelecting Edward Kennedy over and over and over. Senators, who as a group do not obsess much at all over moral and ethical implications, think highly of him, and he earned his reputation in the Senate as a result of long years of work and service. The fact is – Kennedy’s long career should have never happened. His career in the Senate should have ended in July 1969 at the conviction.
Those who teach that moral agency implies one can choose to act as he wants, but one has to take responsibility for the consequences along with the consequences should study Edward Kennedy’s life closely. He illustrates that for many people, the concept is simply bogus. The accident kept him from the Presidency of the United States, but that is really about it. He didn’t lose his political career in the Senate, he did not go to jail, he did not have to pay reparations.
In August 1968, some leaders in the Democratic party came together to see if they could make a deal at the Convention to get Edward Kennedy nominated president – or barring that, vice president. Eventually, and eventually is the right word because Kennedy showed some interest in the idea, Kennedy withdrew from the idea, but in his heart of hearts (as so well expressed in The American Melodrama, “Kennedy in his heart of hearts did not turn down the presidency. He took a rain check on it.”
Suppose what could have happened if Kennedy had just taken the girl back to her hotel without incident. I cannot imagine how the Democrats in 1972 or in 1976 would have taken McGovern, Humphrey, Wallace, and Carter seriously if they had the real possibility of Edward Kennedy unspotted. Nixon possessed so-so popularity with voters in 1968 and 1972, especially considering how he managed to take an unpopular un-winnable Vietnam War and keep it going for four years.
Kennedy did run for president in 1980. Unlike his brother Robert, he had to oppose the President from beginning to end. Furthermore, his candidacy sat under the cloud of the accident, only an 11 year memory then. The Democrats did not really like Carter, but they couldn’t bring themselves to disloyalty for the sake of Kennedy spotted.
Kennedy as a result became an entity with a lot of potential that was either untapped or unwanted. He made his situation. a situation not inevitable.
THE MORAL TO THE STORY
Have someone with you when you take a girl other than your wife home.
IN MEMORIAM WALTER CRONKITE 1916 -- 2009
Walter Cronkite did not start his career in news broadcasting. In 1936-1937 he had a brief career as a radio announcer and sports announcer, then he started news writing as a UPI correspondent. As a new newspaper man, he got to report one of the most horrific disasters in all modern American history: the explosion of the consolidated school at New London, Texas in March 1937. To this day, authorities in that area are loath to admit how many children died in that blast. They make the official excuse that they cannot compile a complete list of deaths because so many temporary roustabouts working in nearby oil fields collected their dead children and buried them in their hometowns. Probably 400 plus children died in that blast that inspired legislators to require gas companies to add odors to natural gas.
Cronkite covered World War II in Europe as a print correspondent, not -- as some wrongly believe -- one of Edward R. Murrow’s radio news reporter stars. Cronkite never did radio news. Cronkite started in TV news at CBS in 1950. By 1951 he had the assignment of the CBS Sunday Night News – 15 minutes of live late news after What’s My Line?
ENTERTAINMENT VERSUS NEWS
The accusation that modern TV news is bad because entertainment guides its ratings is tripe. Cronkite illustrates that entertainment and news have always gone hand in hand.
Cronkite did You are There, an entertainment show masquerading as education, while he worked as a reporter. He appeared twice on What’s My Line? hosted by another news reporter John Charles Daly. His legendary work hosting the CBS coverage of the American space program clearly had audience entertainment in mind.
He appeared as himself on the classiest of 1970s entertainments, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. On the 9 February 1974 episode, “Ted Baxter Meets Walter Cronkite” Cronkite visits WJM News to see his old friend Lou Grant. (Supposedly, they crossed paths as wire service reporters in World War II.) Walter Cronkite and Ted Baxter appeared on the same screen! What a night.
He appeared three times in Murphy Brown
"Murphy Brown" .... Himself (3 episodes, 1989-1997)
- And That's the Way It Was? (1997) TV episode .... Himself
- Ship of Phil's (1993) TV episode (voice) .... Himself
- Roasted (1989) TV episode .... Himself
In “Ship of Phil’s,” he did a memorably funny voiceover. Cronkite was probably the most famous yachtsman among TV network news reporters, and in that particular Murphy Brown episode, Frank Fontana crashes his boat into Cronkite’s boat in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. “Who the hell owns this bucket of bolts?” Cronkite bellows in that famous voice of his, then turning to his beloved wife, “Betsy!” he orders, “Grab the cat. Abandon ship!”
For those interested in another entertainment program that Cronkite found himself embroiled in, refer to a National Public Radio report he did on his hosting of CBS’s live TV coverage of Michael Todd’s Madison Square Garden party in honor of the first anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days. D-Day it was not. A food fight it actually turned into.
HE WAS THERE ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963
In April 1962, CBS appointed him the anchor of the CBS Evening News. In September 1963, he became the anchor of the first half hour long national news broadcast when CBS Evening News went from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes.
Thus He Was There on 22 November 1963 when the first wire service bulletins started clattering into the newsroom of a shooting in President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The first wire service flash found him eating his lunch at his desk. He was eating cottage cheese and pineapple according to one legend I’ve heard, and it is true – his apple sat on his desk for the first few minutes of the TV broadcast. Cronkite got to interrupt the CBS drama As the World Turns to read the text of the first bulletin over a black and white CBS Bulletin card. He actually sounds sweaty and rattled, and who wouldn’t be sweaty and rattled when under the necessity of dropping The Big One in living rooms across the nation? He read the first three bulletins at 1:40 1:43, and 1:47 EST. The third bulletin interrupted a commercial, which is usually unheard of in TV.
His performance stands in stark contrast to Ron Cochrane at ABC News who had to be hauled back to the ABC studio from his luncheon at a major New York restaurant.
In the second bulletin, Cronkite had a wire service quotation from secret service agent Clint Hill that the president was dead. Cronkite was not quite willing to express that news so uncategorically so early in the broadcast, so he worded that piece of information this way:
“A secret service man was heard to say he’s dead. Pause Whether he referred to the president is not known.”
It was known. Cronkite was not willing to use it without some sort of corroborating verification.
Meanwhile Alan Jackson at CBS Radio News, confronted with the same wire service quote, simply avoided the deal by changing its content altogether.
The CBS news room TV cameras did not warm up until 2:00 p.m. EST when Cronkite’s visage and voice both went on the air.
By a little after two p.m., Cronkite had two sources confirming that the president had died.
First, Dan Rather got the news from the priest who performed the last sacrament of the Roman Church for President Kennedy.
Second Eddie Barker, KRLD TV news director, learned of the death from an emergency room doctor who announced the news on live KRLD TV from the Dallas Trade Mart that the president had died.
In normal news, that would have been enough confirmation for an official report. However, Cronkite did not have an official confirmation from the presidential entourage. So he managed to tell the audience that the president was dead, while at the same time noting that the reports were not officially confirmed. It was an act of professionalism rarely seen these days when any old rumor will do in a pinch.
Cronkite performed brilliant that afternoon. It still stands to this day as his big moment. His pronouncement at 2:38 p.m. of the president’s official death notice is the standard soundbite we see when someone wants a piece of Cronkite’s reporting the news that day. However, Cronkite had many memorable sequences that afternoon. Cronkite was so busy getting the news on the air for the first hour and half that he forgot to put on his suit coat. Abut about an hour after the shooting, he did a masterful summary of the news to that point, while a CBS camera operator did a slow, pull- in focus on his face. When he announces that Dan Rather has confirmed the president’s death, the camera operator yanked in on his face like some sort of button to emphasize the point.
William Paley and Don Hewitt decided to give him a break after being on the air live for an hour and a half straight. At that point Cronkite left the set and turned the broadcast over the highly erudite and classy Charles Collingwood. When Cronkite returned a half hour or so later, he wore makeup, a dark tie and a suit. He worked again for a couple of hours straight with very little scripting, and then took another break when Howard Smith replaced him. Smith got to announce the arrival of the presidential plane at Andrews Air Force Base.
Meanwhile at NBC, Chet Huntley, Frank McGee, and Bill Ryan reported the news with help from David Brinckley in Washington and various local reporters (in color because NBC TV’s Fort Worth affiliate had color TV cameras on their news set). They all performed well, though their broadcast resembled amateur night at Hoboken for the first hour. ABC relied on Jay Watson, the news director at the ABC Dallas affiliate, who was the most brilliant TV reporter that day after Cronkite. Cochrane did so-so. The men who filled in for him while he returned from the restaurant looked as if they had been dragged right off the street.
Cronkite was not on the air on 24 November 1963 when Jack Ruby shot and killed the president’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. CBS was broadcasting ceremonials from Washington and started covering that incident live about a minute or two after it happened. NBC TV News broadcast the murder on live TV, something of a first in the sordid history of sordid TV news.
The Kennedy assassination taught CBS News to keep a TV camera on in the news room 24 hours a day so that its news bulletins would have a face to report the news. In September 1964, he was available to do the first bulletin that Soviet leaders Brezhnev / Kosygin and friends had deposed the Russian dictator Kruschev.
CRONKITE AT THE CONVENTIONS
Cronkite anchored CBS News coverage of political conventions, which the exemption of a 1964 conventions. CBS, in one of its more infamous bad judgments, decided to let Bob Trout and Roger Mudd co-anchor to fight back the highest rated coverage of NBC with Huntley-Brinckley.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he made one of his biggest mistakes as a reporter. On the last night of the convention, Chicago’s police rioted injuring dozens of protesters and destroying property belonging to the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. “The thing is simple,” one McCarthy activist described. “They came in and clear out the entire floor [of their hotel headquarters].” The violence spread from the outside to the inside of the convention hall as well. Dan Rather got roughed up on the convention floor on live TV and Cronkite let his emotions show for the rest of the evening. Cronkite got the opportunity to interview Mayor Daley after those incidents, and let his opportunities slide. Instead of getting eyeball to eyeball and nose to nose and demanding to know why Daley authorized gestapo tactics – something Connecticut Senator Abe Ribicoff willingly did on live TV – Daley took Cronkite, in the words of one observer, “like Grant took Richmond.”
In1980, Cronkite and CBS did not get bamboozled, as did ABC TV News, by rumors that Reagan had selected Gerald Ford as his running mate.
CRONKITE AND VIETNAM
Cronkite did reporting from the Vietnam War. from time to time.
In typical liberal histories, Cronkite’s March 1968 Report from Vietnam gets credit for convincing Lyndon Johnson that he had lost average America on the subject of the Vietnam War and to not to run for reelection. In typical conservative histories, America had won the Tet Offensive and then Cronkite ruined it by telling the Americans that the war was a lost cause. The truth turns out to be a little more subtle.
America was already sick of the war before Cronkite announced on live TV what we knew already. Presidential duties and the horrors of War had so completely burned out Johnson by March 1968 that he started seriously pondering his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign for several weeks already. Tet was the first straw, McNamera’s crack up was the second straw, Cronkite’s denunciation was the last straw.
THE NEWS
Typically, we see small sound bites of Walter’s hosting the CBS coverage of Apollo 11's landing on Sunday afternoon, 20 July 1969, but he hosted CBS’s coverage of the Gemini project with equal sophistication and class. His did the bulletins for the first news reports surrounding the Apollo 1 disaster in January 1967. In April 1970, he headed the news coverage of the Apollo 13 almost disaster. His coverage of the last Apollo flights were much more polished than the Apollo 11 coverage, which suffered from a problem in that the CBS simulation of Apollo 11 landed before the actual Apollo 11.
On 4 April 1968, Cronkite got to do the first bulletins of the death of Martin Luther King, which happened during the 5:00 hour in the mountain west. For some reason, KSL TV did not switch on the sound until a minute into the broadcast.
Cronkite also got to interrupt his own CBS Evening News broadcast to report the death of Lyndon Johnson on 22 January 1973. His legendary set of interviews with Lyndon Johnson after Johnson retired are today less interesting than they sound, mostly because Cronkite never screwed up his courage to ask the real question of the day – how does it feel to avoid war crimes trials in the Hague?
Nixon and his like-minded associates despised Cronkite down to their toenails, but oddly enough Cronkite’s reporting on the Watergate Scandal does not stick in the mind. I do not know if he did the first bulletin of Agnew’s resignation. I saw the NBC bulletin at Provo High School. If anything, John Chancellor’s special reports remain the news highlights of Nixon’s September 1973 firings of his attorney general and assistant attorney general when they refused to dismiss Archibald Cox Cronkite anchored the coverage in early August 1974 when Nixon’s resignation became a political necessity, but I guess it says a lot about his professionalism that I do not remember him.
More memorable was the day Cronkite and Dan Rather got to cover two big news stories on 20 January 1981 – Reagan’s inauguration and the release of the Embassy hostages in Iran. CBS made the huge mistake of insisting Cronkite retire in early March 1981. CBS had a mandatory retirement age at that time, but it did not make the same mistake twice. Dan Rather stayed on into his 70s. Cronkite, therefore, missed his opportunity to report on the assassination attempt on Reagan some twenty-four days later.
Cronkite did various sort of news special reports in later years, hosted New Years Day symphony music from Vienna for years, and did for National Public Radio a series of interesting reports on the history of broadcast news.
Cronkite covered World War II in Europe as a print correspondent, not -- as some wrongly believe -- one of Edward R. Murrow’s radio news reporter stars. Cronkite never did radio news. Cronkite started in TV news at CBS in 1950. By 1951 he had the assignment of the CBS Sunday Night News – 15 minutes of live late news after What’s My Line?
ENTERTAINMENT VERSUS NEWS
The accusation that modern TV news is bad because entertainment guides its ratings is tripe. Cronkite illustrates that entertainment and news have always gone hand in hand.
Cronkite did You are There, an entertainment show masquerading as education, while he worked as a reporter. He appeared twice on What’s My Line? hosted by another news reporter John Charles Daly. His legendary work hosting the CBS coverage of the American space program clearly had audience entertainment in mind.
He appeared as himself on the classiest of 1970s entertainments, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. On the 9 February 1974 episode, “Ted Baxter Meets Walter Cronkite” Cronkite visits WJM News to see his old friend Lou Grant. (Supposedly, they crossed paths as wire service reporters in World War II.) Walter Cronkite and Ted Baxter appeared on the same screen! What a night.
He appeared three times in Murphy Brown
"Murphy Brown" .... Himself (3 episodes, 1989-1997)
- And That's the Way It Was? (1997) TV episode .... Himself
- Ship of Phil's (1993) TV episode (voice) .... Himself
- Roasted (1989) TV episode .... Himself
In “Ship of Phil’s,” he did a memorably funny voiceover. Cronkite was probably the most famous yachtsman among TV network news reporters, and in that particular Murphy Brown episode, Frank Fontana crashes his boat into Cronkite’s boat in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. “Who the hell owns this bucket of bolts?” Cronkite bellows in that famous voice of his, then turning to his beloved wife, “Betsy!” he orders, “Grab the cat. Abandon ship!”
For those interested in another entertainment program that Cronkite found himself embroiled in, refer to a National Public Radio report he did on his hosting of CBS’s live TV coverage of Michael Todd’s Madison Square Garden party in honor of the first anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days. D-Day it was not. A food fight it actually turned into.
HE WAS THERE ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963
In April 1962, CBS appointed him the anchor of the CBS Evening News. In September 1963, he became the anchor of the first half hour long national news broadcast when CBS Evening News went from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes.
Thus He Was There on 22 November 1963 when the first wire service bulletins started clattering into the newsroom of a shooting in President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The first wire service flash found him eating his lunch at his desk. He was eating cottage cheese and pineapple according to one legend I’ve heard, and it is true – his apple sat on his desk for the first few minutes of the TV broadcast. Cronkite got to interrupt the CBS drama As the World Turns to read the text of the first bulletin over a black and white CBS Bulletin card. He actually sounds sweaty and rattled, and who wouldn’t be sweaty and rattled when under the necessity of dropping The Big One in living rooms across the nation? He read the first three bulletins at 1:40 1:43, and 1:47 EST. The third bulletin interrupted a commercial, which is usually unheard of in TV.
His performance stands in stark contrast to Ron Cochrane at ABC News who had to be hauled back to the ABC studio from his luncheon at a major New York restaurant.
In the second bulletin, Cronkite had a wire service quotation from secret service agent Clint Hill that the president was dead. Cronkite was not quite willing to express that news so uncategorically so early in the broadcast, so he worded that piece of information this way:
“A secret service man was heard to say he’s dead. Pause Whether he referred to the president is not known.”
It was known. Cronkite was not willing to use it without some sort of corroborating verification.
Meanwhile Alan Jackson at CBS Radio News, confronted with the same wire service quote, simply avoided the deal by changing its content altogether.
The CBS news room TV cameras did not warm up until 2:00 p.m. EST when Cronkite’s visage and voice both went on the air.
By a little after two p.m., Cronkite had two sources confirming that the president had died.
First, Dan Rather got the news from the priest who performed the last sacrament of the Roman Church for President Kennedy.
Second Eddie Barker, KRLD TV news director, learned of the death from an emergency room doctor who announced the news on live KRLD TV from the Dallas Trade Mart that the president had died.
In normal news, that would have been enough confirmation for an official report. However, Cronkite did not have an official confirmation from the presidential entourage. So he managed to tell the audience that the president was dead, while at the same time noting that the reports were not officially confirmed. It was an act of professionalism rarely seen these days when any old rumor will do in a pinch.
Cronkite performed brilliant that afternoon. It still stands to this day as his big moment. His pronouncement at 2:38 p.m. of the president’s official death notice is the standard soundbite we see when someone wants a piece of Cronkite’s reporting the news that day. However, Cronkite had many memorable sequences that afternoon. Cronkite was so busy getting the news on the air for the first hour and half that he forgot to put on his suit coat. Abut about an hour after the shooting, he did a masterful summary of the news to that point, while a CBS camera operator did a slow, pull- in focus on his face. When he announces that Dan Rather has confirmed the president’s death, the camera operator yanked in on his face like some sort of button to emphasize the point.
William Paley and Don Hewitt decided to give him a break after being on the air live for an hour and a half straight. At that point Cronkite left the set and turned the broadcast over the highly erudite and classy Charles Collingwood. When Cronkite returned a half hour or so later, he wore makeup, a dark tie and a suit. He worked again for a couple of hours straight with very little scripting, and then took another break when Howard Smith replaced him. Smith got to announce the arrival of the presidential plane at Andrews Air Force Base.
Meanwhile at NBC, Chet Huntley, Frank McGee, and Bill Ryan reported the news with help from David Brinckley in Washington and various local reporters (in color because NBC TV’s Fort Worth affiliate had color TV cameras on their news set). They all performed well, though their broadcast resembled amateur night at Hoboken for the first hour. ABC relied on Jay Watson, the news director at the ABC Dallas affiliate, who was the most brilliant TV reporter that day after Cronkite. Cochrane did so-so. The men who filled in for him while he returned from the restaurant looked as if they had been dragged right off the street.
Cronkite was not on the air on 24 November 1963 when Jack Ruby shot and killed the president’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. CBS was broadcasting ceremonials from Washington and started covering that incident live about a minute or two after it happened. NBC TV News broadcast the murder on live TV, something of a first in the sordid history of sordid TV news.
The Kennedy assassination taught CBS News to keep a TV camera on in the news room 24 hours a day so that its news bulletins would have a face to report the news. In September 1964, he was available to do the first bulletin that Soviet leaders Brezhnev / Kosygin and friends had deposed the Russian dictator Kruschev.
CRONKITE AT THE CONVENTIONS
Cronkite anchored CBS News coverage of political conventions, which the exemption of a 1964 conventions. CBS, in one of its more infamous bad judgments, decided to let Bob Trout and Roger Mudd co-anchor to fight back the highest rated coverage of NBC with Huntley-Brinckley.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he made one of his biggest mistakes as a reporter. On the last night of the convention, Chicago’s police rioted injuring dozens of protesters and destroying property belonging to the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. “The thing is simple,” one McCarthy activist described. “They came in and clear out the entire floor [of their hotel headquarters].” The violence spread from the outside to the inside of the convention hall as well. Dan Rather got roughed up on the convention floor on live TV and Cronkite let his emotions show for the rest of the evening. Cronkite got the opportunity to interview Mayor Daley after those incidents, and let his opportunities slide. Instead of getting eyeball to eyeball and nose to nose and demanding to know why Daley authorized gestapo tactics – something Connecticut Senator Abe Ribicoff willingly did on live TV – Daley took Cronkite, in the words of one observer, “like Grant took Richmond.”
In1980, Cronkite and CBS did not get bamboozled, as did ABC TV News, by rumors that Reagan had selected Gerald Ford as his running mate.
CRONKITE AND VIETNAM
Cronkite did reporting from the Vietnam War. from time to time.
In typical liberal histories, Cronkite’s March 1968 Report from Vietnam gets credit for convincing Lyndon Johnson that he had lost average America on the subject of the Vietnam War and to not to run for reelection. In typical conservative histories, America had won the Tet Offensive and then Cronkite ruined it by telling the Americans that the war was a lost cause. The truth turns out to be a little more subtle.
America was already sick of the war before Cronkite announced on live TV what we knew already. Presidential duties and the horrors of War had so completely burned out Johnson by March 1968 that he started seriously pondering his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign for several weeks already. Tet was the first straw, McNamera’s crack up was the second straw, Cronkite’s denunciation was the last straw.
THE NEWS
Typically, we see small sound bites of Walter’s hosting the CBS coverage of Apollo 11's landing on Sunday afternoon, 20 July 1969, but he hosted CBS’s coverage of the Gemini project with equal sophistication and class. His did the bulletins for the first news reports surrounding the Apollo 1 disaster in January 1967. In April 1970, he headed the news coverage of the Apollo 13 almost disaster. His coverage of the last Apollo flights were much more polished than the Apollo 11 coverage, which suffered from a problem in that the CBS simulation of Apollo 11 landed before the actual Apollo 11.
On 4 April 1968, Cronkite got to do the first bulletins of the death of Martin Luther King, which happened during the 5:00 hour in the mountain west. For some reason, KSL TV did not switch on the sound until a minute into the broadcast.
Cronkite also got to interrupt his own CBS Evening News broadcast to report the death of Lyndon Johnson on 22 January 1973. His legendary set of interviews with Lyndon Johnson after Johnson retired are today less interesting than they sound, mostly because Cronkite never screwed up his courage to ask the real question of the day – how does it feel to avoid war crimes trials in the Hague?
Nixon and his like-minded associates despised Cronkite down to their toenails, but oddly enough Cronkite’s reporting on the Watergate Scandal does not stick in the mind. I do not know if he did the first bulletin of Agnew’s resignation. I saw the NBC bulletin at Provo High School. If anything, John Chancellor’s special reports remain the news highlights of Nixon’s September 1973 firings of his attorney general and assistant attorney general when they refused to dismiss Archibald Cox Cronkite anchored the coverage in early August 1974 when Nixon’s resignation became a political necessity, but I guess it says a lot about his professionalism that I do not remember him.
More memorable was the day Cronkite and Dan Rather got to cover two big news stories on 20 January 1981 – Reagan’s inauguration and the release of the Embassy hostages in Iran. CBS made the huge mistake of insisting Cronkite retire in early March 1981. CBS had a mandatory retirement age at that time, but it did not make the same mistake twice. Dan Rather stayed on into his 70s. Cronkite, therefore, missed his opportunity to report on the assassination attempt on Reagan some twenty-four days later.
Cronkite did various sort of news special reports in later years, hosted New Years Day symphony music from Vienna for years, and did for National Public Radio a series of interesting reports on the history of broadcast news.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
OBAMA IN MOSCOW -- John Adams should make it an opera
Culled from the day's headlines -- three paragraphs from one of the President's addresses in Russia:
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE NEW ECONOMIC SCHOOL GRADUATION
President Barack Hussein Obama
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 7, 2009
Gostinny Dvor
Moscow, Russia
12:13 P.M. (Local)
Yet unfortunately, there is sometimes a sense that old assumptions must prevail, old ways of thinking; a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future. There is the 20th century view that the United States and Russia are destined to be antagonists, and that a strong Russia or a strong America can only assert themselves in opposition to one another. And there is a 19th century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence, and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another.
These assumptions are wrong. In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over. As I said in Cairo, given our independence, any world order that -- given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game -- progress must be shared.
That's why I have called for a "reset" in relations between the United States and Russia. This must be more than a fresh start between the Kremlin and the White House -- though that is important and I've had excellent discussions with both your President and your Prime Minister. It must be a sustained effort among the American and Russian people to identify mutual interests, and expand dialogue and cooperation that can pave the way to progress.
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
I do not know how Our President can say this stuff with a straight face. The United States has demonized, meddled and interfered with its neighbors for decades -- in Mexico, in Cuba, in Central America, recently in Iraq, which is actually closer to Russia than to the USA. Years ago, the USA sent troops into the Soviet Union to take sides in the War Between the Reds and the Whites. Our example through history remains quite clear: If any government has a right to medal in Georgia, Ukraine, Iran and Iraq, it is Russia since it is closer.
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE NEW ECONOMIC SCHOOL GRADUATION
President Barack Hussein Obama
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 7, 2009
Gostinny Dvor
Moscow, Russia
12:13 P.M. (Local)
Yet unfortunately, there is sometimes a sense that old assumptions must prevail, old ways of thinking; a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future. There is the 20th century view that the United States and Russia are destined to be antagonists, and that a strong Russia or a strong America can only assert themselves in opposition to one another. And there is a 19th century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence, and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another.
These assumptions are wrong. In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over. As I said in Cairo, given our independence, any world order that -- given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game -- progress must be shared.
That's why I have called for a "reset" in relations between the United States and Russia. This must be more than a fresh start between the Kremlin and the White House -- though that is important and I've had excellent discussions with both your President and your Prime Minister. It must be a sustained effort among the American and Russian people to identify mutual interests, and expand dialogue and cooperation that can pave the way to progress.
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
I do not know how Our President can say this stuff with a straight face. The United States has demonized, meddled and interfered with its neighbors for decades -- in Mexico, in Cuba, in Central America, recently in Iraq, which is actually closer to Russia than to the USA. Years ago, the USA sent troops into the Soviet Union to take sides in the War Between the Reds and the Whites. Our example through history remains quite clear: If any government has a right to medal in Georgia, Ukraine, Iran and Iraq, it is Russia since it is closer.
Monday, July 6, 2009
IN MEMORIAM MOLLIE SUGDEN 1922 - 2009
In the 1990s, British actress Mollie Sugden suddenly found herself a cult favorite in America when the BBC started to license some of its old sitcoms to PBS. Channel 7 KUED showed these during the ten and eleven o’clock hours for years. This is how I first became a fan of Mollie Sugden.
Few actress have been funny on such a scale and for such a long stretch of time as Mollie Sugden. As a professional, she had no vanity, except to get laughs. Like Lucille Ball, she did anything the writers concocted and made it even more funny than they could have hoped.
For examples –
She portrayed a Hyacinth Bucket- like character in The Liverbirds at least two decades before Roy Clark came up with Keeping Up Appearances. Her comic stock in trade was big hats, pretensions to upper class respectability undercut by pies in faces and whoopie cushions
In Come Home Mrs. Noah she portrayed a 21st century house wife that got lost in space, literally. It gave her an opportunity to wear more funny clothing and float around in comic poses weightless.
In That’s My Boy, she examined the comic potential of mother-son-adoption humor.
Are You Being Served (produced in 1972 to 1985 by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft) still remains the BBC’s prime example of English humor as self cleaning pornography. It set standards for double entendres and double word meanings that few series have ever reached. In it she played “Mrs. Betty Slocombe,” the senior staff member of the Ladies Intimate Apparel department (undies, knickers, and bras) of a very old-style patrician London Department Store called Grace Brothers. Young Mr. Grace was so old that he needed round the clock nursing care. Mrs. Slocombe’s comic stock in trade included malapropism, hair home-dyed every possible neon color with maybe the exception of black, and a tendency toward sexual double entendres involving her house cat Tiddles.
At one point, the male sales personnel think she is pregnant, when in fact she is talking about the love life of her house cat, who is in fact with kittens:
BRAHMS: “You say you don’t know who the father is.”
SLOCOMBE : Well – yes and no. I suspect it was on my birthday. I came back from the pub after a few too many and I did not shut the door properly. I think he lives with that woman in the next house. .... He’s Burmese . . . . He spends all day crouched in her rhubarb peering in.”
Typical was this exchange over the phone with her neighbor when she had to work late, and she wanted him to feed her cat
“I want you to look through my letter slot, and if you see my pussy, drop a sardine on the mat.”
Three beats of a pause. “No I am not home.”
In the famous episode where the entire clothing staff took a weeks change and manned a toy department:
SLOCOMBE “They have nothing but mechanical dogs. Do they have any mechanical pussys?”
PEACOCK: “People, they find, prefer the real thing.”
She could make any number of lines rather sexy if not just sexual. In “Camping In,” she describes her first sighting during a World War II carpet bombing of her never-seen husband:
SLOCOMBE in dead serious reminiscent: “I first saw his face lit by an incendiary. He threw me on my face and said, Look out here comes a big one.”
In “German Week,” she examines a Deutsche klein bustenhalten big enough to slingshot two watermelons and notes dryly, “Well built those German girls.”
She could do comedy in lederhosen, a wedding gown that opened both forward and back, overpetticoated puffy formal dresses, evening gowns too tight to walk in, showgirl teddies, motorcyclist leather kit, moll wear, charwoman work gear complete with mop, overfrilly lingerie, one-piece sleeper with footsies, and Little Girl drag in two very memorable episodes.
When she reverted to age 5 after a head injury:
PEACOCK: “Who is the prime minister?”
LITTLE GIRL BETTY: {triumphantly, as if answer a kindergarten pop quiz} “Mr. Baldwin.”
SPOONER: “Thank God at least it isn’t Gladstone.”
In an episode where she briefly became management, she ordered a three-piece executive woman’s suit, generating this memorable exchange on the prospect of pin strips with Trevor Bannister’s wiseguy junior men sales=assistant character:
SLOCOMBE: “Stripes are so slimming, aren’t they?”
LUCAS: “Well, have you ever seen a fat zebra?”
She may have been the funniest female drunk in British Television, most memorably when she nearly married a Greek who left her at the alter and she went through a charade wedding quite intoxicated on brandy in order to get the wedding gift – a house -- from her expatriate uncle living in Texas. In “German Week,” after swilling an entire bottle of very spirited German wine, she says with all the dignity a drunk can muster, “You know this hat must be too tight. It makes me feel quite giddy.”
In the episode that featured Mr. Granger’s Retirement dinner, she guzzles four Vodka martinis before swilling Japanese tinned champaign. The legendary poofster men’s sales assistant Mr. Humphreys, notes “You know what they say about vodka. One drink’s great, two’s the most, Three you're under the table. Four you're under the host.”
SLOCOMBE: [flirting] “Oh what will you say next?”
HUMPHREYS: “Mr. Rumbold’s the host.”
Another of her comic catch phrases that swept England and PBS watching America – “and I am unanimous in this!” She also took her earring off to answer the telephone, which from the looks of it dated to sometime in the reconstruction of London.
Wendy Richard , who worked with Ms Sugden in Are You Being Served? and Are You Being Served Again! went on the official record as saying that Mollie Sugden had in Are You Being Served a comic look that could freeze an ox at 100 paces, which Richard used when she became Pauline in The East Enders. The directors always seemed to have a camera on her, to capture every look, because she could do comic looks even when she didn’t have lines.
In 1992, most of the Are You Being Served cast came together again for Grace and Favour (retitled Are You Being Served Again! for the PBS market) to manage a country manor bed-and- breakfast somewhere in what is left of rural Glouchester, England. Apparently she got a contract stipulation that she did not have to wear multi-colored wigs: thus, she got to show off her gray hair and her comic timing, which if anything, had gotten sharper with age.
In this series, she got to play off Billy Burrad who portrayed “Moulterd,” a crude north country farmer who she might have had a fling with in the 1940s as a Great Lolloping Land Girl evacuated from urban England to rural England during the German blitzkrieg. During the famous trial at which authorities accused her of stealing a cart, she tells him “Not that long ago” when on the witness block he makes it sound as if they went back to the days of Disraeli. She also got to explore the comic potential of a real cat, a fossilized cat { “I have a pussy of ancient antiquity and I hoped you have someone who could come round to appraise it.”}, chickens, and hogs.
Mollie died on 1 July 2009, age 86. Both Wendy Richard and Mollie Sugden died in the same year 2009, but fortunately both of their images live on in the videotapes of the shows in which they starred. She performed brilliant comedy. She remains a favorite and I am unanimous in it!
Few actress have been funny on such a scale and for such a long stretch of time as Mollie Sugden. As a professional, she had no vanity, except to get laughs. Like Lucille Ball, she did anything the writers concocted and made it even more funny than they could have hoped.
For examples –
She portrayed a Hyacinth Bucket- like character in The Liverbirds at least two decades before Roy Clark came up with Keeping Up Appearances. Her comic stock in trade was big hats, pretensions to upper class respectability undercut by pies in faces and whoopie cushions
In Come Home Mrs. Noah she portrayed a 21st century house wife that got lost in space, literally. It gave her an opportunity to wear more funny clothing and float around in comic poses weightless.
In That’s My Boy, she examined the comic potential of mother-son-adoption humor.
Are You Being Served (produced in 1972 to 1985 by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft) still remains the BBC’s prime example of English humor as self cleaning pornography. It set standards for double entendres and double word meanings that few series have ever reached. In it she played “Mrs. Betty Slocombe,” the senior staff member of the Ladies Intimate Apparel department (undies, knickers, and bras) of a very old-style patrician London Department Store called Grace Brothers. Young Mr. Grace was so old that he needed round the clock nursing care. Mrs. Slocombe’s comic stock in trade included malapropism, hair home-dyed every possible neon color with maybe the exception of black, and a tendency toward sexual double entendres involving her house cat Tiddles.
At one point, the male sales personnel think she is pregnant, when in fact she is talking about the love life of her house cat, who is in fact with kittens:
BRAHMS: “You say you don’t know who the father is.”
SLOCOMBE : Well – yes and no. I suspect it was on my birthday. I came back from the pub after a few too many and I did not shut the door properly. I think he lives with that woman in the next house. .... He’s Burmese . . . . He spends all day crouched in her rhubarb peering in.”
Typical was this exchange over the phone with her neighbor when she had to work late, and she wanted him to feed her cat
“I want you to look through my letter slot, and if you see my pussy, drop a sardine on the mat.”
Three beats of a pause. “No I am not home.”
In the famous episode where the entire clothing staff took a weeks change and manned a toy department:
SLOCOMBE “They have nothing but mechanical dogs. Do they have any mechanical pussys?”
PEACOCK: “People, they find, prefer the real thing.”
She could make any number of lines rather sexy if not just sexual. In “Camping In,” she describes her first sighting during a World War II carpet bombing of her never-seen husband:
SLOCOMBE in dead serious reminiscent: “I first saw his face lit by an incendiary. He threw me on my face and said, Look out here comes a big one.”
In “German Week,” she examines a Deutsche klein bustenhalten big enough to slingshot two watermelons and notes dryly, “Well built those German girls.”
She could do comedy in lederhosen, a wedding gown that opened both forward and back, overpetticoated puffy formal dresses, evening gowns too tight to walk in, showgirl teddies, motorcyclist leather kit, moll wear, charwoman work gear complete with mop, overfrilly lingerie, one-piece sleeper with footsies, and Little Girl drag in two very memorable episodes.
When she reverted to age 5 after a head injury:
PEACOCK: “Who is the prime minister?”
LITTLE GIRL BETTY: {triumphantly, as if answer a kindergarten pop quiz} “Mr. Baldwin.”
SPOONER: “Thank God at least it isn’t Gladstone.”
In an episode where she briefly became management, she ordered a three-piece executive woman’s suit, generating this memorable exchange on the prospect of pin strips with Trevor Bannister’s wiseguy junior men sales=assistant character:
SLOCOMBE: “Stripes are so slimming, aren’t they?”
LUCAS: “Well, have you ever seen a fat zebra?”
She may have been the funniest female drunk in British Television, most memorably when she nearly married a Greek who left her at the alter and she went through a charade wedding quite intoxicated on brandy in order to get the wedding gift – a house -- from her expatriate uncle living in Texas. In “German Week,” after swilling an entire bottle of very spirited German wine, she says with all the dignity a drunk can muster, “You know this hat must be too tight. It makes me feel quite giddy.”
In the episode that featured Mr. Granger’s Retirement dinner, she guzzles four Vodka martinis before swilling Japanese tinned champaign. The legendary poofster men’s sales assistant Mr. Humphreys, notes “You know what they say about vodka. One drink’s great, two’s the most, Three you're under the table. Four you're under the host.”
SLOCOMBE: [flirting] “Oh what will you say next?”
HUMPHREYS: “Mr. Rumbold’s the host.”
Another of her comic catch phrases that swept England and PBS watching America – “and I am unanimous in this!” She also took her earring off to answer the telephone, which from the looks of it dated to sometime in the reconstruction of London.
Wendy Richard , who worked with Ms Sugden in Are You Being Served? and Are You Being Served Again! went on the official record as saying that Mollie Sugden had in Are You Being Served a comic look that could freeze an ox at 100 paces, which Richard used when she became Pauline in The East Enders. The directors always seemed to have a camera on her, to capture every look, because she could do comic looks even when she didn’t have lines.
In 1992, most of the Are You Being Served cast came together again for Grace and Favour (retitled Are You Being Served Again! for the PBS market) to manage a country manor bed-and- breakfast somewhere in what is left of rural Glouchester, England. Apparently she got a contract stipulation that she did not have to wear multi-colored wigs: thus, she got to show off her gray hair and her comic timing, which if anything, had gotten sharper with age.
In this series, she got to play off Billy Burrad who portrayed “Moulterd,” a crude north country farmer who she might have had a fling with in the 1940s as a Great Lolloping Land Girl evacuated from urban England to rural England during the German blitzkrieg. During the famous trial at which authorities accused her of stealing a cart, she tells him “Not that long ago” when on the witness block he makes it sound as if they went back to the days of Disraeli. She also got to explore the comic potential of a real cat, a fossilized cat { “I have a pussy of ancient antiquity and I hoped you have someone who could come round to appraise it.”}, chickens, and hogs.
Mollie died on 1 July 2009, age 86. Both Wendy Richard and Mollie Sugden died in the same year 2009, but fortunately both of their images live on in the videotapes of the shows in which they starred. She performed brilliant comedy. She remains a favorite and I am unanimous in it!
IN MEMORIUM ROBERT MCNAMARA: OR CIVILIANS HAVE TO BE RIGHT FOR CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY TO WORK
In the Documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara admitted during The War of the Pacific he and General Curtis LeMay planned the bombing of civilian populations in Tokyo. McNamera reported that LeMay admitted if the USA had lost WWII, they would have been tried for war crimes against humanity.
I don't know what is worse morally -- doing war crimes or admitting that you SHOULD have been tried for war crimes.
McNamara apparently believed in the 1960s that World War III would happen if the USA lost the Vietnam War. Therefore, he continued to oversee the Vietnam War even though he knew at the time that its concept was a mistake. Only years later, did he admit the mistake.
Again, I don't know what is worse: doing war crimes (twice apparently) or knowing that you have committed war crimes and continuing the crime.
At least Robert McNamara still had a conscious in 1968. When he resigned as Secretary of Defense, he did so because he thought he had done evil and he had to stop. McNamara stood in stark moral contrast to Clark Clifford. When Clark Clifford assumed duties as Secretary of Defense, he decided to convince Lyndon Johnson to reject increases in American troop levels. Clifford could have told the president that the War was hopeless and to just stop it, but instead he went through complex public relations to give the administration the appearance of peaceful change without actually going through peaceful change. Perhaps it would be better to state that Clifford wanted to improve the appearance of the war so the Democrats had a better chance of winning the 1968 presidential election.
There a moral to this story --
we need to create a structure to try war criminals outside the concept of victory and defeat. Only war criminals who lose get tried on this planet. Victors always claim that their war crimes were just and necessary for victory.
I don't know what is worse morally -- doing war crimes or admitting that you SHOULD have been tried for war crimes.
McNamara apparently believed in the 1960s that World War III would happen if the USA lost the Vietnam War. Therefore, he continued to oversee the Vietnam War even though he knew at the time that its concept was a mistake. Only years later, did he admit the mistake.
Again, I don't know what is worse: doing war crimes (twice apparently) or knowing that you have committed war crimes and continuing the crime.
At least Robert McNamara still had a conscious in 1968. When he resigned as Secretary of Defense, he did so because he thought he had done evil and he had to stop. McNamara stood in stark moral contrast to Clark Clifford. When Clark Clifford assumed duties as Secretary of Defense, he decided to convince Lyndon Johnson to reject increases in American troop levels. Clifford could have told the president that the War was hopeless and to just stop it, but instead he went through complex public relations to give the administration the appearance of peaceful change without actually going through peaceful change. Perhaps it would be better to state that Clifford wanted to improve the appearance of the war so the Democrats had a better chance of winning the 1968 presidential election.
There a moral to this story --
we need to create a structure to try war criminals outside the concept of victory and defeat. Only war criminals who lose get tried on this planet. Victors always claim that their war crimes were just and necessary for victory.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
SARAH IS RESIGNING FROM WHAT? TO RUN FOR WHAT??
COMMENTARY Sarah Palin is a political gimmick that takes herself way too seriously these days.
Frankly, I do not see how her complaining about the tedium of governorship of Alaska, her complaining about the unblinking glare of negative publicity, and then her resigning the governorship of Northern Exposure Out in the Boonies --- a place with less population than a third of of the counties in California --- will make her more presidential. The presidency can be an even worse, even more-tedious sort of job.
There is precedent for American voters to elect men to presidency after a single term as a governor
Tilden nominated for presidency 1876 after 1 term as New York governor
Cleveland won presidency 1884 after 1 term as New York governor
McKinley won presidency 1896 after 1 term as Ohio governor
T Roosevelt won vice presidency 1900 after 1 term as New York governor
Then assumed presidency
Wilson won presidency 1912 after part term as New Jersey governor
Coolidge won vice presidency 1920 after 1 term as Massachusetts governor
Then assumed presidency
F Roosevelt won presidency 1932 after 2 terms as New York governor
Dewey nominated for presidency 1944 after part term as New York governor
Rockefeller ran for presidency 1960 after part term as New York governor
Reagan ran for presidency 1968 after part term as California governor
Carter won presidency 1976 after one term as Georgia governor
None of them resigned way in advance of the elections in question complaining about the pressures of office.
Frankly, I do not see how her complaining about the tedium of governorship of Alaska, her complaining about the unblinking glare of negative publicity, and then her resigning the governorship of Northern Exposure Out in the Boonies --- a place with less population than a third of of the counties in California --- will make her more presidential. The presidency can be an even worse, even more-tedious sort of job.
There is precedent for American voters to elect men to presidency after a single term as a governor
Tilden nominated for presidency 1876 after 1 term as New York governor
Cleveland won presidency 1884 after 1 term as New York governor
McKinley won presidency 1896 after 1 term as Ohio governor
T Roosevelt won vice presidency 1900 after 1 term as New York governor
Then assumed presidency
Wilson won presidency 1912 after part term as New Jersey governor
Coolidge won vice presidency 1920 after 1 term as Massachusetts governor
Then assumed presidency
F Roosevelt won presidency 1932 after 2 terms as New York governor
Dewey nominated for presidency 1944 after part term as New York governor
Rockefeller ran for presidency 1960 after part term as New York governor
Reagan ran for presidency 1968 after part term as California governor
Carter won presidency 1976 after one term as Georgia governor
None of them resigned way in advance of the elections in question complaining about the pressures of office.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
MICHAEL JACKSON 1958- 2009 REWORKED EDITORIAL ON PUBLIC WORSHIP OF INSANITY
A few days ago, we remembered, 22 June 1969, the 40th anniversary of the death of Judy Garland in London -- and now this shocking development: Michael Jackson died as he prepared to perform in London. Tough town.
I heard the first bulletins of the sudden death of Michael Jackson as I drove around Provo running errands. BBC Radio announced sketchy reports that Michael Jackson had been rushed by ambulance from his home to hospital. This was during the 3 o'clock hour. In the 5:00 hour, National Public Radio reported as its first story that Jackson indeed was dead. As I write these words, I am listening to continuous coverage of KNX-AM Radio Los Angeles.
Farrah Fawcett died on 25 June 2009 as well. This is one of those rare days when two celebrities died on the same day. When Elvis Presley died -- and my memory of that day is that his death generated the same sort of public displays of grief -- Groucho Marx also died within a day. I remember that 1985 day that Yul Brynner and Orson Welles died on the same day.
Speaking of Presley, both Jackson and Presley died in decline as has-beens. Presley died a fat has-been; Jackson died a skinny, physically scarred has-been. Presley’s death rejuvinated his struggling career almost overnight. Jackson’s death will probably increase his commercial marketability overnight.
I liked some of his performances and songs. He was not, though, one of my favorite celebrity performers. He sold merchandise in record numbers, so by the standards of Hollywood that makes him The King of Pop. He, however, lived by his own set of creative and moral rules. His talent, great as it was, WAS , got disrupted by a series of weird sexual scandals, mental illnesses, and bizarre behavior, For example, it is hard to forget his hanging of a baby over a balcony. For another example, it is hard to forgive him for naming two of his children after himself Prince Michael one and two. l will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what he did to boys and to how many of them. It will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what sorts of substances he abused.
His death, however, did not surprise me.
All those plastic surgeries take a toll on the health, especially considering how badly some of the surgeries turned out. The trouble with having lots of money is that it can procure one all kinds of medical procedures whether one needs them, whether they are actually good or not. Literally he resembled a person 80 years of age.
Enduring all the public worship and hatred for decades takes a toll on the health.
Drug abuse takes a toll on the health, too.
Performing live before the public for decades takes a toll on the health as well -- all those adrenalin rushes, all the panic attacks, all the highs and lows of mental health.
Mr. Jackson possessed enormous singing, musical, and dancing talent, and most people do not understand where that sort of creativity comes. Thus he had to endure the insults and the sniping of the little untalented clumps and the jealous wannabes.
I heard one of his more vocal supporters say tonight on the radio that his upcoming revival tour of live performances would have restored him to triumphant stardom again, but there is no shred of physical evidence now to support that contention. He was 50 years of age, and few singing stars have returned to greatness after dissipating themselves so spectacularly in their 30s.
I remember something that Bernard Shaw wrote in the notes to Caesar and Cleopatra He compared-contrasted Caesar, and Charles XII, and Joan of Arc, and Admiral Nelson that
"were like most modern self made millionaires half witted geniuses, enjoying the worship according by all races certain forms of insanity."
The adulation that the public heaped on Jackson today validates Shaw's assessment --
but we didn't realize how insane Jackson really could get. Worshiping Jackson could get rather uncomfortable.
For example:
Jackson settled that 1993 pedofile accusation out of court, and the 2005 jury found him not guilty of child sexual abuse by getting kids drunk -- yet somehow he never quite shook off the negative image. He didn’t help this at all – he lived by his own sets of rules and continued to associate openly with boys. One has wonder about the parents of Michael’s boys – what did they expect? What did they really think?
I completely forgot about that exoneration, and yet somehow I always considered him a known child molester. It is one thing for an adult to like kids. It is quite another thing for that adult to appear to like kids more than adults. It is a public image problem that no amount of sophisticated public relations could fix.
Take a look at this comment that I copied from the comments section of an article detailing Jackson’s sudden death. I don’t know what MSM means, but I can’t be good, that’s for sure.
When I heard Jacko died, I laughed since I (like all thinking humans) was shocked that the disgusting, misjudging MSM actually still considered him celebrity enough to warrant making a big deal over his death! Nothing could be further from the truth! In my opinion, the amoral MSM is glorifying a weirdass pedophile with issues concerning gay sex, not growing up, and hating his black skin color! As a moralist, I can’t in good faith give so much as a damn about Jacko dying because of what a serial fruitcake, lunatic and molester he looked to be. This is the weirdass, folks, who wore masks in public, slept in beds with little boys until the cows came home, slowly began to turn his once-black skin white via weirdo treatments, and lived like a five-year-old little boy his whole adult life! This guy is/was a pervert in my opinion! He was such a perv, in my opinion, that the only creatures mourning him are his longtime lover, Bubbles the Chimp, and Macaulay Culkin, his first victim!
In a Prairie Home Companion joke show held around the time of the trial, two jokes that got huge laughs from Garrison Keillor’s audience illustrate public perceptions of Jackson:
What is the difference between a grocery sack and Michael Jackson?
One is plastic and dangerous for children to play with, and the other holds groceries.
What does Michael Jackson like about twentyeight year olds?
The fact that there are twenty of them.
His estate Neverland located near Santa Barbara, California illustrated one of the creepiest aspects of Jackson’s mental state. A title of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree," opens the news reel sequence of Citizen Kane. Jackson, like William Randolph Hearst, actually did it. The name suggests that land of lost boys in Sir James Barrie’s ubbercreapy play Peter Pan, which at least in Barrie’s version features unsettling dark emotional undercurrents in it about males who refuse to mature and who prefer male bonding to heterosexual coupling. Jackson built an amusement park on the property as well, and it suggested overtly Pleasure Island in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) – a place designed to entice and then entrap boys.
It says a lot about Michael Jackson’s colossal stature in 20th century popular culture worldwide that a an Old Testament warning Prophecy may have actually warned about him.
Background:
In the 1983 MTV music video Thriller, Jackson transforms into a dancing friendly monster, an image usually negative in American pop culture.
In 1987, he recorded an album and song called “Bad.” Bad in the context of the song was positive in a perverse sort of way. Roughly at the same time, a urban slang expression bad evolved which meant “good.” It confused all sorts of old people all over the nation. It is quite true, as explained by the on-line answer site called answers.com, that
Most people might think that the slang usage of bad to mean its opposite, “excellent,” is a recent innovation of Black English. While it is of Black English origin, this usage has been recorded for over a century; the first known example dates from 1897. Even earlier, beginning in the 1850s, the word appears in the sense “formidable, very tough,” as applied to persons. Whether or not the two usages are related, they both illustrate a favorite creative device of informal and slang language—using a word to mean the opposite of what it “really” means. This is by no means uncommon; people use words sarcastically to mean the opposite of their actual meanings on a daily basis. What is more unusual is for such a usage to be generally accepted within a larger community. Perhaps when the concepts are as basic as “good” and “bad” this general acceptance is made easier. A similar instance is the word uptight, which in the 1960s enjoyed usage in the sense “excellent” alongside its now-current, negative meaning of “stiff.”
However, most black kids knew nothing about historical English of 1897, but they knew Michael Jackson and the connotation of the song “Bad.”
In 1991, Jackson recorded an album and song and music video called “Black or White.”
His co-stars included very young Macaully Calkin (who insisted that Jackson had never harmed him, which is not quite the same thing as saying that Culkin did not have any sort of intimacy with Jackson) and George Wendt. For the record, I will state that I thought the young black Michael Jackson was the most sexy, desirable, and cute of the various incarnations of Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, he had enough money to indulge his excesses, one of which was boys and another of which was transformational plastic surgery. Over the years, he got progressively more caucasian and more white, and his hair got progressively longer, blacker, and straighter. Officially, the explanation for the color change was a skin disorder that makes negroid skin white. Unofficially, rumors circulated of skin-lightening drugs gone awry.
Back to the song: On the surface at least the song lyric extolls tolerance for our sexual and racial differences. The video images though were something else again. The images morphed at such a fast rate that I came away with an overall impression of some sort of internationalist grey race not quite male, not quite female entirely. And it was all young.
And so by the late 1990s, and certainly by 2005 when California tried to convict him of being a danger to boys everywhere, I thought of Michael when reading this passage from the Old Testament:
Isaiah 5:20 1611 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Joseph Smith 1829 translation
20 Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Depending on the type of translations from ancient Hebrew to English and what words originally occupied the scripture – it is really not much a stretch to translate the passage this way
Isaiah 5: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call bad good, and good bad; that put black for white, and white for black; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 Wo unto them that call bad good, and good bad, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
It speaks volumes about the moral decay of Hollywood that so few people talking about Jackson in the media even mention the scandals of his private life. However, if a single male someone without musical or dancing talent had moved on 1320 North and set up a house to attract boys, that would be the only thing my neighbors would talk about.
My mind goes back to the little boy who performed with his brothers in television variety programs of the early 1970s.
My mind goes back to the 1978 movie version of The Wiz directed by Sidney Lumet. The New Yorker’s film critic said of the thing that it was almost as stagey as Victor Fleming’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, but that the Wiz’s sets made less sense. The setting was the most art deco sections of Manhattan. Diana Ross portrayed a 30ish repressed school teacher Dorothy from Harlem, which was only the first of its problems. I remember Ross, I remember Richard Pryor as the Wizard, I remember Mabel King as the Wicked Witch, I remember Lena Horne as the Good Witch, I remember “Can You Feel a Brand New Day.” I literally do not remember Michael Jackson at all as the Scarecrow. I suspect he got to dance more in that role than did Ray Bolger in that role in the 1939 film, but I don’t remember a thing about it.
My mind goes back to my viewing of Captain EO at Disney Land in 1991, Michael Jackson starred in Captain EO in 1986 for the Disney Organization, produced by George Lucas and directed by of all people Francis Ford Coppola. He costarred with Anjelica Huston and wrote the music with James Horner who scored it. Lucasfilm-Disney -DDD filmed the short in 3-D that required glasses. The nicest thing to say about EO is this: if it hadn’t starred Jackson and if it hadn’t featured his music, and if it hadn’t been filmed in 3-D, EO would have been unbearably awful. One of the captain’s opening lines was something like, “They say we are losers, but we are the greatest.” That is not the sort of line that studs the mind with details. It is also the sort of line one should try to say with a straight face toward the end of a movie, not at the beginning. With Jackson, with 3-D, with his music, Captain EO was bearably awful. Jackson’s entrance was unforgettable in 3-D – the camera focused in close on Jackson’s glorious backside wearing a tight space suit. The rest of the movie for me is a loud, three-dimensional blur.
My mind goes back to the young man who in Thriller, an early and highly influential music MTV video of 1983 directed by of all people John Landis, observed wryly that he was different from the other boys. That turned out to be one of the great understatements of that time.
Fortunately, much of his performances have been saved on audio and video recordings so that the future generations can make their own judgements about Michael Jackson and his talent.
I heard the first bulletins of the sudden death of Michael Jackson as I drove around Provo running errands. BBC Radio announced sketchy reports that Michael Jackson had been rushed by ambulance from his home to hospital. This was during the 3 o'clock hour. In the 5:00 hour, National Public Radio reported as its first story that Jackson indeed was dead. As I write these words, I am listening to continuous coverage of KNX-AM Radio Los Angeles.
Farrah Fawcett died on 25 June 2009 as well. This is one of those rare days when two celebrities died on the same day. When Elvis Presley died -- and my memory of that day is that his death generated the same sort of public displays of grief -- Groucho Marx also died within a day. I remember that 1985 day that Yul Brynner and Orson Welles died on the same day.
Speaking of Presley, both Jackson and Presley died in decline as has-beens. Presley died a fat has-been; Jackson died a skinny, physically scarred has-been. Presley’s death rejuvinated his struggling career almost overnight. Jackson’s death will probably increase his commercial marketability overnight.
I liked some of his performances and songs. He was not, though, one of my favorite celebrity performers. He sold merchandise in record numbers, so by the standards of Hollywood that makes him The King of Pop. He, however, lived by his own set of creative and moral rules. His talent, great as it was, WAS , got disrupted by a series of weird sexual scandals, mental illnesses, and bizarre behavior, For example, it is hard to forget his hanging of a baby over a balcony. For another example, it is hard to forgive him for naming two of his children after himself Prince Michael one and two. l will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what he did to boys and to how many of them. It will be darned interesting to finally hear just exactly what sorts of substances he abused.
His death, however, did not surprise me.
All those plastic surgeries take a toll on the health, especially considering how badly some of the surgeries turned out. The trouble with having lots of money is that it can procure one all kinds of medical procedures whether one needs them, whether they are actually good or not. Literally he resembled a person 80 years of age.
Enduring all the public worship and hatred for decades takes a toll on the health.
Drug abuse takes a toll on the health, too.
Performing live before the public for decades takes a toll on the health as well -- all those adrenalin rushes, all the panic attacks, all the highs and lows of mental health.
Mr. Jackson possessed enormous singing, musical, and dancing talent, and most people do not understand where that sort of creativity comes. Thus he had to endure the insults and the sniping of the little untalented clumps and the jealous wannabes.
I heard one of his more vocal supporters say tonight on the radio that his upcoming revival tour of live performances would have restored him to triumphant stardom again, but there is no shred of physical evidence now to support that contention. He was 50 years of age, and few singing stars have returned to greatness after dissipating themselves so spectacularly in their 30s.
I remember something that Bernard Shaw wrote in the notes to Caesar and Cleopatra He compared-contrasted Caesar, and Charles XII, and Joan of Arc, and Admiral Nelson that
"were like most modern self made millionaires half witted geniuses, enjoying the worship according by all races certain forms of insanity."
The adulation that the public heaped on Jackson today validates Shaw's assessment --
but we didn't realize how insane Jackson really could get. Worshiping Jackson could get rather uncomfortable.
For example:
Jackson settled that 1993 pedofile accusation out of court, and the 2005 jury found him not guilty of child sexual abuse by getting kids drunk -- yet somehow he never quite shook off the negative image. He didn’t help this at all – he lived by his own sets of rules and continued to associate openly with boys. One has wonder about the parents of Michael’s boys – what did they expect? What did they really think?
I completely forgot about that exoneration, and yet somehow I always considered him a known child molester. It is one thing for an adult to like kids. It is quite another thing for that adult to appear to like kids more than adults. It is a public image problem that no amount of sophisticated public relations could fix.
Take a look at this comment that I copied from the comments section of an article detailing Jackson’s sudden death. I don’t know what MSM means, but I can’t be good, that’s for sure.
When I heard Jacko died, I laughed since I (like all thinking humans) was shocked that the disgusting, misjudging MSM actually still considered him celebrity enough to warrant making a big deal over his death! Nothing could be further from the truth! In my opinion, the amoral MSM is glorifying a weirdass pedophile with issues concerning gay sex, not growing up, and hating his black skin color! As a moralist, I can’t in good faith give so much as a damn about Jacko dying because of what a serial fruitcake, lunatic and molester he looked to be. This is the weirdass, folks, who wore masks in public, slept in beds with little boys until the cows came home, slowly began to turn his once-black skin white via weirdo treatments, and lived like a five-year-old little boy his whole adult life! This guy is/was a pervert in my opinion! He was such a perv, in my opinion, that the only creatures mourning him are his longtime lover, Bubbles the Chimp, and Macaulay Culkin, his first victim!
In a Prairie Home Companion joke show held around the time of the trial, two jokes that got huge laughs from Garrison Keillor’s audience illustrate public perceptions of Jackson:
What is the difference between a grocery sack and Michael Jackson?
One is plastic and dangerous for children to play with, and the other holds groceries.
What does Michael Jackson like about twentyeight year olds?
The fact that there are twenty of them.
His estate Neverland located near Santa Barbara, California illustrated one of the creepiest aspects of Jackson’s mental state. A title of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree," opens the news reel sequence of Citizen Kane. Jackson, like William Randolph Hearst, actually did it. The name suggests that land of lost boys in Sir James Barrie’s ubbercreapy play Peter Pan, which at least in Barrie’s version features unsettling dark emotional undercurrents in it about males who refuse to mature and who prefer male bonding to heterosexual coupling. Jackson built an amusement park on the property as well, and it suggested overtly Pleasure Island in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) – a place designed to entice and then entrap boys.
It says a lot about Michael Jackson’s colossal stature in 20th century popular culture worldwide that a an Old Testament warning Prophecy may have actually warned about him.
Background:
In the 1983 MTV music video Thriller, Jackson transforms into a dancing friendly monster, an image usually negative in American pop culture.
In 1987, he recorded an album and song called “Bad.” Bad in the context of the song was positive in a perverse sort of way. Roughly at the same time, a urban slang expression bad evolved which meant “good.” It confused all sorts of old people all over the nation. It is quite true, as explained by the on-line answer site called answers.com, that
Most people might think that the slang usage of bad to mean its opposite, “excellent,” is a recent innovation of Black English. While it is of Black English origin, this usage has been recorded for over a century; the first known example dates from 1897. Even earlier, beginning in the 1850s, the word appears in the sense “formidable, very tough,” as applied to persons. Whether or not the two usages are related, they both illustrate a favorite creative device of informal and slang language—using a word to mean the opposite of what it “really” means. This is by no means uncommon; people use words sarcastically to mean the opposite of their actual meanings on a daily basis. What is more unusual is for such a usage to be generally accepted within a larger community. Perhaps when the concepts are as basic as “good” and “bad” this general acceptance is made easier. A similar instance is the word uptight, which in the 1960s enjoyed usage in the sense “excellent” alongside its now-current, negative meaning of “stiff.”
However, most black kids knew nothing about historical English of 1897, but they knew Michael Jackson and the connotation of the song “Bad.”
In 1991, Jackson recorded an album and song and music video called “Black or White.”
His co-stars included very young Macaully Calkin (who insisted that Jackson had never harmed him, which is not quite the same thing as saying that Culkin did not have any sort of intimacy with Jackson) and George Wendt. For the record, I will state that I thought the young black Michael Jackson was the most sexy, desirable, and cute of the various incarnations of Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, he had enough money to indulge his excesses, one of which was boys and another of which was transformational plastic surgery. Over the years, he got progressively more caucasian and more white, and his hair got progressively longer, blacker, and straighter. Officially, the explanation for the color change was a skin disorder that makes negroid skin white. Unofficially, rumors circulated of skin-lightening drugs gone awry.
Back to the song: On the surface at least the song lyric extolls tolerance for our sexual and racial differences. The video images though were something else again. The images morphed at such a fast rate that I came away with an overall impression of some sort of internationalist grey race not quite male, not quite female entirely. And it was all young.
And so by the late 1990s, and certainly by 2005 when California tried to convict him of being a danger to boys everywhere, I thought of Michael when reading this passage from the Old Testament:
Isaiah 5:20 1611 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Joseph Smith 1829 translation
20 Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Depending on the type of translations from ancient Hebrew to English and what words originally occupied the scripture – it is really not much a stretch to translate the passage this way
Isaiah 5: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 ¶ Woe unto them that call bad good, and good bad; that put black for white, and white for black; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
2 Nephi 15: 20 Rick Soulier 2009 translation
20 Wo unto them that call bad good, and good bad, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
It speaks volumes about the moral decay of Hollywood that so few people talking about Jackson in the media even mention the scandals of his private life. However, if a single male someone without musical or dancing talent had moved on 1320 North and set up a house to attract boys, that would be the only thing my neighbors would talk about.
My mind goes back to the little boy who performed with his brothers in television variety programs of the early 1970s.
My mind goes back to the 1978 movie version of The Wiz directed by Sidney Lumet. The New Yorker’s film critic said of the thing that it was almost as stagey as Victor Fleming’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, but that the Wiz’s sets made less sense. The setting was the most art deco sections of Manhattan. Diana Ross portrayed a 30ish repressed school teacher Dorothy from Harlem, which was only the first of its problems. I remember Ross, I remember Richard Pryor as the Wizard, I remember Mabel King as the Wicked Witch, I remember Lena Horne as the Good Witch, I remember “Can You Feel a Brand New Day.” I literally do not remember Michael Jackson at all as the Scarecrow. I suspect he got to dance more in that role than did Ray Bolger in that role in the 1939 film, but I don’t remember a thing about it.
My mind goes back to my viewing of Captain EO at Disney Land in 1991, Michael Jackson starred in Captain EO in 1986 for the Disney Organization, produced by George Lucas and directed by of all people Francis Ford Coppola. He costarred with Anjelica Huston and wrote the music with James Horner who scored it. Lucasfilm-Disney -DDD filmed the short in 3-D that required glasses. The nicest thing to say about EO is this: if it hadn’t starred Jackson and if it hadn’t featured his music, and if it hadn’t been filmed in 3-D, EO would have been unbearably awful. One of the captain’s opening lines was something like, “They say we are losers, but we are the greatest.” That is not the sort of line that studs the mind with details. It is also the sort of line one should try to say with a straight face toward the end of a movie, not at the beginning. With Jackson, with 3-D, with his music, Captain EO was bearably awful. Jackson’s entrance was unforgettable in 3-D – the camera focused in close on Jackson’s glorious backside wearing a tight space suit. The rest of the movie for me is a loud, three-dimensional blur.
My mind goes back to the young man who in Thriller, an early and highly influential music MTV video of 1983 directed by of all people John Landis, observed wryly that he was different from the other boys. That turned out to be one of the great understatements of that time.
Fortunately, much of his performances have been saved on audio and video recordings so that the future generations can make their own judgements about Michael Jackson and his talent.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
INSURANCE REFORM VS. HEALTH REFORM
I feel intense disappointment in Senators Bennett and Hatch for using scare tactics to justify no medical insurance reform. I wish they and the rest of the Republican establishment would behave honestly and tell us to our faces that the Republicans believe only people with money deserve to have good health and access to the American system of medicine.
Of course, our Senators have plenty of company in the Congress. These days, health care reform discussions illustrate Congress’s preference to appear to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something. Its behavior wears thin in this time of crisis.
The debate on health care reform has generated all sorts of oddities. For a start, I find it unacceptable that few -- if any -- people publicly discuss how much profit insurance companies should make – or even if they should make a profit at all. This basic assumption remains crucial to the debate.
Furthermore, many citizens, politicians, and policy experts obsess over the issue of whether private insurance funds or a public one-payer system should pay for the medical system. Yet hardly anyone discusses what governments should do to promote good health.
We will get reforms only when we citizens and our Congressional representatives get serious about the scope and nature of reform. For example, we should stop allowing farmers to grow tobacco, the ingredients of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If we could reduce if not eliminate the number of people who use these dangerous and unhealthy substances to their detriment, that will reduce medical costs of these substances’ wide-spread bad effects.
Let us look at this issue in a way that will become more important as the planet gets more overpopulated. How long should starving people tolerate the growth of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana on properties that could grow more food? How long will the starving poor put up with the excuse that the needs of moneyed addicts for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine take precedent over the needs of the poor for food?
This editorial feels a little scattered even to me.
Therefore, let me conclude with my three calls to action.
1) We should promote healthy practices first.
2) Congress should rise to the occasion and set up a one-payer system that will helps pay medical bills. It should set up that system independent of employers. We should unlink finally employment and health benefits.
3) We should not tolerate the growth and use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine, for they increase the costs of both illness and health.
Of course, our Senators have plenty of company in the Congress. These days, health care reform discussions illustrate Congress’s preference to appear to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something. Its behavior wears thin in this time of crisis.
The debate on health care reform has generated all sorts of oddities. For a start, I find it unacceptable that few -- if any -- people publicly discuss how much profit insurance companies should make – or even if they should make a profit at all. This basic assumption remains crucial to the debate.
Furthermore, many citizens, politicians, and policy experts obsess over the issue of whether private insurance funds or a public one-payer system should pay for the medical system. Yet hardly anyone discusses what governments should do to promote good health.
We will get reforms only when we citizens and our Congressional representatives get serious about the scope and nature of reform. For example, we should stop allowing farmers to grow tobacco, the ingredients of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If we could reduce if not eliminate the number of people who use these dangerous and unhealthy substances to their detriment, that will reduce medical costs of these substances’ wide-spread bad effects.
Let us look at this issue in a way that will become more important as the planet gets more overpopulated. How long should starving people tolerate the growth of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana on properties that could grow more food? How long will the starving poor put up with the excuse that the needs of moneyed addicts for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine take precedent over the needs of the poor for food?
This editorial feels a little scattered even to me.
Therefore, let me conclude with my three calls to action.
1) We should promote healthy practices first.
2) Congress should rise to the occasion and set up a one-payer system that will helps pay medical bills. It should set up that system independent of employers. We should unlink finally employment and health benefits.
3) We should not tolerate the growth and use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine, for they increase the costs of both illness and health.
HAPPY UNFATHERS DAY
Happy UnFathers Day
In his 19 June column Garrison Keillor said of Fathers Day that it has more to do with cheap commercialism than it does about fathers. I would put it this way: Fathers Day has everything Mothers Day has – plus more cheap commercialism and less sincerity.
I am 53 and have never once been wished a Happy Fathers Day, just because I never reproduced.
So I eat a meal at a restaurant by myself alone to celebrate UnFathers Day.
Entirely too many think of Fatherhood strictly in a biological sense.
Jesus never reproduced biologically, so far as anyone can tell, John Brown’s sexual fantasies notwithstanding, and the yet the New Testament is full of references to him as a spiritual father.
George Washington never reproduced, and yet we still call him the Father of the Country.
Abraham Lincoln never fathered any slaves and yet many former slaves thought of him as Father Abraham.
Even before my friend Richard adopted a daughter two years ago, he had the spirit of fatherhood about him.
Creativity is fatherhood.
Sound advise is fatherhood.
Mentoring is fatherhood.
In his 19 June column Garrison Keillor said of Fathers Day that it has more to do with cheap commercialism than it does about fathers. I would put it this way: Fathers Day has everything Mothers Day has – plus more cheap commercialism and less sincerity.
I am 53 and have never once been wished a Happy Fathers Day, just because I never reproduced.
So I eat a meal at a restaurant by myself alone to celebrate UnFathers Day.
Entirely too many think of Fatherhood strictly in a biological sense.
Jesus never reproduced biologically, so far as anyone can tell, John Brown’s sexual fantasies notwithstanding, and the yet the New Testament is full of references to him as a spiritual father.
George Washington never reproduced, and yet we still call him the Father of the Country.
Abraham Lincoln never fathered any slaves and yet many former slaves thought of him as Father Abraham.
Even before my friend Richard adopted a daughter two years ago, he had the spirit of fatherhood about him.
Creativity is fatherhood.
Sound advise is fatherhood.
Mentoring is fatherhood.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
A few days ago, we remembered the 40th anniversary of the death of Judy Garland -- and now this shocking development.
I heard the first bulletins of the sudden death of Michael Jackson as I drove around Provo running errands. During the 3 o'clock hour MDT, I heard on my car radio.BBC Radio announce sketchy reports that an ambulance rushed Michael Jackson had rushed him from his home to hospital.
In the 5:00 hour, I heard National Public Radio report as its first story that Jackson indeed had died. As I write these words, I am listening to continuous coverage of KNX-AM Radio Los Angeles and of KSL-AM Radio Salt Lake City.
Farrah Fawcett died today as well. This is one of those rare days when two celebrities died on the same day. When Elvis Presley died back in August 1977 -- and my memory of that day recalls his death generated the same sort of big disorganized public displays of grief -- Groucho Marx died with a day. I remember the day in 1985 that Yul Brynner and Orson Welles died on the same day.
I cannot say Jackson's death surprises me.
All those plastic surgeries take a toll on the health, especially considering how badly some of the surgeries turned out. The trouble with having lots of money is that it can procure one all kinds of medical procedures whether one needs them, whether they are actually good or not.
Enduring all the public worship and hatred for decades takes a toll on the health.
Drug abuse takes a toll on the health, too.
Performing live before the public for decades takes a toll on the health as well -- all those adrenalin rushes, all the panic attacks, all the highs and lows.
Mr. Jackson possessed enormous singing, musical, and dancing talent, and most people do not understand where that sort of creativity comes. Thus he had to endure the insults and the sniping of the little talents and the jealous wannabes.
I heard one of his more vocal supporters say tonight on the radio that his upcoming revival tour of live performances would have restored him to triumphant stardom again, but there is no shred of physical evidence now to support that contention. He was 50 years of age, and few singing stars have returned to greatness after dissipating themselves so spectacularly in their 30s.
I remember something that Bernard Shaw wrote in the notes to Caesar and Cleopatra . He compared-contrasted Caesar, and Charles XII, and Joan of Arc, and Admiral Nelson "who were like most modern self made millionaires half witted geniuses, enjoying the worship according by all races certain forms of insanity."
The adulation that the public heaped on Jackson seems today to validate Shaw's assessment --
but we didn't realize how insane Jackson really could get. Worshiping Jackson could get rather uncomfortable.
For example:
Jackson settled that 1993 pedofile accusation out of court, and the 2005 jury found him not guilty of child sexual abuse by getting kids drunk -- yet somehow he never quite shook off the negative image. It is one thing for an adult to like kids. It is quite another thing for that adult to appear to like kids more than adults. No amount of sophisticated public relations can fix a public image problem of that magnitude.
My mind goes back to the little boy who performed with his brothers in television variety programs of the early 1970s. My mind goes back to the young man who in an early and highly influential music video of 1983 observed wryly that he was different from the other boys. That turned out to be one of the great understatements of that time. Fortunately, much of his performances have been saved on audio and video recordings so that the future generations can make their own judgements about Michael Jackson and his talent.