MLK day is coming! It's the 21st. MLK wanted people of every color to hold hands and play together.
Obama on the other hand is factional. He hates the whites of western PA who want to cling to God and guns. He hated Zimmerman and Crowley because they didn't look like him. Trayvon did, so Obama was cool with Trayvon (imagine a white president saying Zimmerman looks more like me, so he must have been innocent).
MLK stood for color-blindness!
He also stood for plagiarism and adultery!
Obama is for faction on color lines, like Mugabe!
In Mississippi they celebrate MLK along with Robert E. Lee. Oh the sense of humor in Mississippi! Gotta hand it to those confederates! But MLK has nothing to do with Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee is more like Obama. Obama wants us to be good slaves, working for him as he turns America into one big plantation.
If you go back to JFK he asked us not to ask what the country could do for us, but what we could do for the country. But did he mean we would be slaves? He stood AGAINST Cuba and was shot by a communist dirtbag named Oswald.
In other words, he meant country first, not faction. JFK was no communist. BHO is all about faction. He is out of the Tammany tradition in which you divide up the pie, and give all of it that you can to your voters. You redistribute the pie to your voters. That's Tammany for you. It's also Marx. "Workers of the world unite!" Sayeth Marx in the Communist Manifesto (it's also on his tomb). This means unite AGAINST the employers, and take over the "means of production," or in the case of Marxist-feminists, the "means of reproduction." Black Marxists use it to argue that blacks should combine against others, or Native Americans against others, or what have you hyphenated creep of groupthink roiling in the scrum, uses it to unite, and now it's everybody against the white male. But Romney didn't want WHITE MALES to stand against ANY group: he wanted the business community to stand together with the religious community.
Romney, like MLK, stood for inclusiveness. He stood for universalist ideals in which we were first and last AMERICANS. (It was difficult for him to vocalize what he meant as he was such a wooden stick, so I am helping him along.) Business has to do well AS A WHOLE. You can't have a raise unless the company is doing well. We are part of larger economic ecosystems.
Nazis used law to discriminate against Jews and divide up the pie and give it only to Aryans. Law actively discriminated against the owners (esp. if Jewish) and seized goods and factories for the state, even allowing the state to pick gold out of the teeth of the newly dead. Stalin had similar laws in which the state owned all and any private holdings including a cow that a kulak might try to hold onto was repossessed and the kulak sent to Siberia to learn her lesson. Equality came in the form of a scythe wielded by the death panels of the State!
Not everyone is an entrepreneur so we will never be equal. Entrepreneurs are more rare than great poets which they resemble! No two poets are equal or even similar. More rare than artists! No two artists can be ranked alike because each has a different calling and the State cannot plan for this individual any more than the state can decide which poems we can write! Equality has nothing to do with quality. Under liberal capitalism under Romney this would have been understood. Quality was Romney's litmus test not equality. Liberty to follow one's calling. There is a time and a place for everything but only we can decide. Marx tried to END history by killing the lions and serving lamb. Obama is similar. He's against guns! He's against business! He's against the Constitution! He doesn't like anybody who doesn't look like him! He's all faction, and scapegoating and he tries to plan for others! He is a mistake who thinks he's always right!
MLK would have accepted Romney and Romney would have accepted him. Obama is cut from a different cloth. He is more akin to Stalin and Hitler, more akin to Marx, more akin to Mao, more akin to Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and to Robert E. Lee. We must unite under universal laws that discriminate against no particular faction and that are good for each individual. Tammany has never understood this. It is the Lincoln group that did, and the W. group that did. We must unite around universal human rights based on the sovereignty of the individual.
MLK's crusade was not for equality but for quality.
OBAMA is something else: a carpet bagger, an opportunist, a good for nothing, someone with big ideas that nobody wants, but that are so vaguely and charmingly put, that no one can resist. I alone have remained awake, and am dedicated to the individual. Long live Lutheran Surrealism!
83 comments:
Kirby,
King and Romney did work together. Indeed, Romney famously supported desegregation as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Nixon, and was ultimately fired because of it, cf.,
How George Romney tried to eliminate a ‘high-income white noose’ around black neighborhoods. If you read the quotes from the linked article, it will be clear how far ahead of his time Romney was in his thinking. It's too bad he lost the primary to Nixon, as he'd clearly have made the better President.
There's a myth that Romney and King marched together, but this has been debunked. Nevertheless, the historical record makes it clear that Romney did participate in Civil Rights marches, cf. Did George Romney March With Martin Luther King?, contemporaneously if not together with Dr. King.
But calling them blood brothers would hardly do. At the time, the Mormon Church's theology was strongly prejudiced against blacks, and Romney himself got into considerable trouble with the Church over his support of Civil Rights. He stood his ground, and subsequently became one of the Mormon leaders who were most identified with the subsequent liberalization of the Mormon Church on precisely this issue.
Part of what distinguished Romney, both in his dealings with his church and with his political opponents, was his ability to work effectively behind the scenes to create change. This didn't help with Nixon, but then, not much did.
Thank you for this, Stu. I really want some flowers for the Romneys since they worked so hard and ultimately got nothing in terms of the presidency.
I just think Mitt didn't have the verbal fluidity to counter Barack Obama's brilliance in that arena. I don't think any of the current Republicans can come close. Perhaps Rubio from Cubio or the other Bush.
But it's too late to counter him any way.
I was unaware of the activities of Romney during the Nixon administration.
I was never much interested in King. Not being of a religious persuasion, I never identified with his Christian crusading. In the 1960's, Northerners officially were more tolerant of Negroes, and believed that the South needed to be brought into compliance with full integration. But King's Baptist bully pulpit seemed to be more about creating a figure-head around which Black people could rally, than about any intellectual point. In other words, he was just a polite advocate with an effective speaking style, a style which appealed to church-going people.
In his personal life, King was by no means exemplary, despite people's desire to have him be a shining messiah on the hill. King seemed all about winning, about "leading his people out of bondage" etc.
I never really identified with him.
Part I
"Obama is cut from another cloth than MLK."
That's right. MLK was a Southern Baptist Preacher who became a spokesperson for Negro American rights and liberation. That seems to have been his whole agenda. Obama is the son of a native African national, and an American (white) mother. He was raised partly in Indonesia, partly in Hawaii. Obama is not an American Negro, or an African American, as such. He's a different animal altogether. He brings a certain objectivity to the questions of race and ethnicity in the American context, which is quite refreshing. He's unlike African Americans, though he's often described as one. I don't think he carries the same kind of traditional resentment they do. He's almost free of it.
"Obama on the other hand is factional. He hates the whites of western PA . . . ."
I don't see any hate in Obama's policies. He's indicated his displeasure with the huge bonuses given to Wall Street executives, and I think that's a nearly universal scorn shared by fellow Americans. We bailed these people out after they trashed our economy, and still they're rewarded. It's obscene.
"MLK . . . stood for plagiarism and adultery!"
I don't think "stood for" is quite the right syntax. He was caught doing both, but he certainly didn't advocate those things. They were embarrassments.
"Robert E. Lee . . . more like Obama. Obama wants us to be good slaves, working for him as he turns America into one big plantation."
This is quite a stretch. Lee was a graduate of West Point, was basically against slavery, and against the secession of the states, and supported Reconstruction after the war. He's a tragic figure, one of America's greatest military leaders. Your misuse of him here is rather insulting, to say the least.
"JFK . . . stood AGAINST Cuba and was shot by a communist dirtbag named Oswald."
JFK wanted to liberate Cuba. His plan failed. I'm not one of those who accept that Oswald acted alone, or that he acted out of Communist sympathy. I think Oswald was controlled by other forces; that there were other shooters ("on the green" in Dallas), and that we will certainly never know the real story behind the plot.
"BHO is all about faction. He is out of the Tammany tradition in which you divide up the pie, and give all of it that you can to your voters."
There is no "Tammany tradition." Obama governs on the principle that the people should benefit from what the people contribute. Not just the rich. Not just business. But all the people. If that's what you mean by giving it back to the voters, then you're nearer the truth.
"Black Marxists . . . argue that blacks should combine against others, or Native Americans against others, or what have you hyphenated creep of groupthink roiling in the scrum, uses it to unite, and now it's everybody against the white male."
I'm not sure there are many "Black Marxists" in America. Would any self-identify as such? I doubt it. So you're left with deciding whom you think are "secret" Marxists.
Part II
"But Romney didn't want WHITE MALES to stand against ANY group: he wanted the business community to stand together with the religious community."
This is an interesting speculation. White Christians standing together with big business to front their agenda. I think there's a lot of truth in that, actually.
"You can't have a raise unless the company is doing well."
The habit of American business has been to fire American employees, no matter how hard they work, and no matter how successful the business is. Your economic model is completely outdated and false.
Artists and entrepreneurs are not similar. Separate kinds of talent, not transferable, and the implications of their respective efforts are not comparable.
"Quality was Romney's litmus test not equality."
I don't want to twist your words here, but I think what Romney believed was that rich people "deserved" their wealth, whereas everyone else--the vaunted "45%"--were blood-suckers.
Obama isn't a Marxist. He isn't against business. Business has been living outside the law for a generation, and it's high time it was brought to heel. As the middle class declines in America, so do its markets. American business doesn't care whether America thrives or not, that's not its concern. In the larger context of the so-called "Global Economy" American entrepreneurs and capitalists respect no borders, hate domestic taxes and regulation, and care only for their selfish ends. THEY are the bad Americans. THEY are sheltering their income from taxes. THEY are sending jobs overseas. THEY are trashing the environment.
"MLK would have accepted Romney and Romney would have accepted him."
Another big stretch. MLK's influence was waning at the time of his assassination. Would he have anything good to say about Romney? Doubtful, given his politics.
"MLK's crusade was not for equality but for quality."
I think you're diametrically wrong here. Just the opposite.
"OBAMA is something else: a carpet bagger, an opportunist, a good for nothing, someone with big ideas that nobody wants, but that are so vaguely and charmingly put, that no one can resist."
All politicians are opportunists. That's how it works.
Re: Carpetbaggers: according to Wiki, "Together with Republicans they are said to have politically manipulated and controlled former Confederate states for varying periods for their own financial and power gains."
That puts your claim in a somewhat different light. If Obama is a carpetbagger, he's as guy raised in Hawaii who came to the mainland to get ahead. He certainly succeeded. He's been elected twice to the highest office in the land.
" I alone have remained awake, and am dedicated to the individual."
You sound like a True Believer, here. Dreams of glory. You're getting that wild look in your eye again.
There's a story of two Romneys here, and I've been reflecting on the difference that I see between them. Of course, I've injected George into the discussion, if only to try to create an unintended interpretation of Kirby's post that makes his core thesis arguable.
Obviously, my memory of George was generally positive, and the process of re-acquaintance with him via the wiki article about him and other sources I've encountered over the past year has only tended to reinforce that sense. Equally obviously, I'm less positive about his son Mitt. And I've been asking myself, "why?"
I'd like to float some tentative answers.
A first hypothesis might be that somehow the 1960's were a more tranquil political environment, with less polarization, making it easier to see the humanity in one's political opponents. This hypothesis fails with any honest assessment of the 60's, and the intense controversies over the Vietnam war, civil rights, and sexuality. The 60s were extremely turbulent, and the demonization of particular political figures was as much a feature of that era as ours (e.g., consider the anti-war movement's demonization of LBJ, which was so successful that he declined to run for a second term in '68).
The second hypothesis seems to work better. And that is that the Republican and Democratic parties of the era were ill-aligned with respect to the then-current cultural battles. The line of demarcation between the parties was mostly along the labor/management axis, and this resulted in reasonably well defined liberal/conservative division on economic lines, but no dominating correlation with the specific cultural battles that defined the 60s.
Thus, that era saw Democratic hawks (Scoop Jackson comes to mind) as well as Republican doves (e.g., John Anderson). Indeed, there was a long-standing Republican isolationist streak, which was reflected in Republican criticisms of Wilson during WWI, and of Roosevelt's support of the Allied powers through Lend-Lease prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. This preference for non-involvement lasted well into the Eisenhower administration, e.g., in Matthew Ridgway's advice not to intervene at Dien Bien Phu. Curiously, the beginning of the end of Republican isolationism can be traced to the Chinese Revolution, and the Republican reaction to it (which was, naturally enough, to blame the Truman administration), in the years leading up to the 1952 presidential election.
In the civil rights arena, one saw Republicans on the forefront (e.g., George Romney), as well as outright segregationists in the Democratic party (Strom Thurmond and George Wallace come immediately to mind). Indeed, as JADL has pointed out, the civil rights stance of the Republican Party of the mid-60's was more liberal, more modern than the stance of the Democratic party of the time.
But the upshot was that the Republican party of the 1960s could accomodate people like George Romney -- a good management-type (he'd been very successful as President of AMC), conservative financially, but liberal on civil rights. He was no partisan gun-slinger, and instead was someone who believed in working together, finding common interests, and solving common problems.
What changed was Nixon's southern strategy, which was specifically intended to re-align the party along the social fault lines defined by civil rights, sexuality, and even militarism. This was a pragmatic demographic decision, and one that resulted in Republicans holding the Presidency for twenty of the twenty-four years between 1968 and 1992. Indeed, if you consider the longer period from 1968 to 2008, Republicans held the Presidency for twenty-eight of forty years, and the twelve "exceptional" years of Democratic Presidencies were centrist southerners (Carter and Clinton). George stood against the southern strategy, ran against it, and lost. And this re-alignment created the very different partisan context in which Mitt attempted his run at the Presidency.
(1 of 2)
(2 of 2)
And so, I'm back to father and son. At some level, I see George and Mitt as having similar values on issues like race and good management. But I see two crucial differences.
The first is that George was largely self-made. He attended college, but didn't graduate. He worked himself up through the business world, reached a personal pinnacle as the President (and temporary savior) of AMC. Mitt, on the other hand, was anything but self-made. His patrimony included not only a Harvard MBA, it included the funds to get him started in business. George understood the challenges and motivations of people for whom the American dream was an aspiration. Mitt never got it. Having never been a part of the working class, and dependent on the next paycheck to meet current bills, he lacked some crucial frames for understanding his fellow citizens, and this resulted in a kind of socio-economic blindness.
The second is that George was a living counterweight to both Goldwater and Nixon in the Republican party. During the '64 campaign, he supported Goldwater's opponents, and during the convention, he worked to soften Goldwater's planks. During the '68 campaign, he ran against Nixon. In the end, he did the "Team of Rivals" stint as Secretary of HUD, but in doing so, he maintained his principled (and liberal) view of urban planning, and this lead to his firing. Mitt, too, is a kind of counterweight, but he's an incredibly ineffectual one. In the end, rather than sticking to his principles (e.g., as revealed by RomneyCare, or his past support of reproductive rights, etc.), he sacrificed them to make himself acceptable to the radical, know-nothing successors of his father's opponents within the party. In short, in precisely the circumstances where his father was brave, Mitt's political courage was found wanting.
I'm not sure if Mitt had been more "courageous" this would have served him any better in the contemporary world of Republican Party politics.
I see a long trend beginning in the early '60's, starting with Goldwater, continuing through Nixon and Reagan to Bush I and Bush II. The conservative agenda was based on the idea that FDR and Eisenhower and Johnson were "socialists." Realizing that the old "business is good for America" routine wouldn't work, they aimed to create coalitions around hot-button "moral" issues which would appeal to Southerners and working-class whites.
Mitt Romney represents the late stage predatory capitalism of corporate raiding, downsizing, offshoring and "derivative" instruments. He sees the economic landscape in Darwinian terms, where everyone plays hard-ball, and ordinary working-people are pawns in a struggle for domination, by any means necessary. Government is not the answer, but the problem. Government gets in the way of profit, and "steals" the fruits of investment, which it "redistributes" to the undeserving poor. It has no interest in a strong middle class, and works to undermine the influence of unions. It wants to do away with all social "programs" such as Social Security, Medicare, welfare, education, public works.
Like all Republicans, Mitt couldn't discuss his agenda openly, but had to hedge. To the extent that principles guided his acts, he had no principles. Like them, he didn't really give a shit about abortion or unisex or environmental safety or gun ownership. Those were just talking points, designed to divert attention away from his true constituency.
You will see Kirby following the party line right in lockstep on these issues.
that's LOCKEstep
john lockestep
has a ring to it
kirby your timing here is impeccable
and so vital to the
american sense of self
if only MLK jr had known
what we know today
his statue in washington
may have been made of black granite
instead of white sandstone
....or am i overstating the case
anyway
happy national federal holiday to all good americans and the bad ones too
(which reagan only begrudgingly signed into the federal calendar...the pretentious bastard...he is still in purgatory that's for sure)
i'm just happy the world's problems are being ironed out somewhere
lootran surrealism
por nunc
yo
jh
Mitt's humor wasn't quick enough or congenial enough. It's part of what's needed to put yourself over the top. W. was funnier than Kerry or Gore. Obama was funnier than McCain or Romney.
Humor is the ticket to the White House.
Reagan had it.
Goldwater didn't.
I'm not saying what we need are comedians, but the People tend to vote for them. It's another version of Bread and Circuses.
Hillary would be fun to have run next time because she's the least consciously hilarious of all the pantsuits coming down the corridors of power with the possible exception of Pelosi.
MLK spoke to me because he could actually quote Scripture and referred to it with ease. The MLA doesn't, and so has no truck with me.
I liked Santorum finally the best of the Republicans, but it's Huckabee with the humorous sensibility. He just needs to be a lot less short. We need someone we can LOOK UP to.
It's real hard to know what can be done just now with the shortcomings of our current group. The Republicans have the south locked in for the most, just as the Democrats have all the angry groups locked in: black Marxists, Marxist feminists, gay activists, and all the actual Marxists throughout academia.
Republicans have small business owners, big business owners, rightwing Christians, and me.
Keynes won largely in the Keynes-Hayek debates because he was so much more affable. He could crack jokes and he had hundreds of friends and lovers.
Hayek was very square and prim and couldn't make jokes on the spot.
But he was correct I think on an ideological basis.
I'd like to see a Huckabee vs. Hillary race next time around but I fear that she will be the last casualty of Benghazi, and perhaps the one that Obama actually did plan out as an act of commission rather than omission.
"Just say it had something to do with a film..." He said sternly, hoping that she would.
"You know, come out as pro-censorship, and the media will see you as a feminist censor-type, and then your career will be stuck permanently in the mud, yo."
Aside from the hilarity of the various carpet baggers and their attempts to drum up votes, it would be good to have someone working on a few universals that left and right could agree upon. What about going after sex traffickers together?
It's a big problem, and would unite the parties. We need to have a few universals to unite the nation as the Cold War did.
What are universals upon which everyone can agree? Maybe something like: our kids are important. On that topic, I am willing to ban guns, as well as abortions.
Hymnly.
Heck, I'm even for getting the BMI into homes. Your waist size is supposed to be half or less of the inches of your height.
I'm 70 inches tall and 34" waist.
So I fit. Could I be a poster boy for something in this administration?
i think obama is the court jester in his adminstration
so yeah maybe kirby you could take some social weight off of him by being the court jester a mediator between republican idiocy and democratic charitable excess prance the aisle in sequins and swimming goggles a sort of tinker bell yet chanting gregory corso poems i for one would find that charming
part of what the beats were beating around the bush about was the idea that downandnouters creeps and criminals and ne'erdo wells and rapscallions and drifters and lost souls of every sort had a place in the pantheon of literature and life ...sad to say it was all transposed within a smokefilled room of narcotic and alcoholic delusion but
you can't have everything when it comes to literary movements you just can't have everything or can you maybe in the philosophic schools of verse you can have everything everything is fair game every topic equally tenable if not tenacious a sort of nude descending a staircase approach to perception
today begins a week of prayer for christian unity
what does god ask of us
unity in comedy
cymbal smash
hoot from the peanut gallery
kazoo fart
jh
JH, thanks you are the court jester on this blog, but also the saint.
I thank Curtis for his courteous dialogue here. I don't really see eye to eye with many of his statements but can see how he arrived at them. I think it's just slightly out of date, but we are all starlight and the light is old by the time it reaches us.
The older Romney may well have been more egalitarian than the younger as Stu says. If you go back yet another generation you have Mormon polygamy in the hills of Mexico. There are many who are for marital arrangements across a wide sweep to be accepted.
In Sweden I believe that they accept polygamy, gay marriage, and probably you can marry an animal by now. It's all about inclusion.
I suppose consent doesn't matter much but it gets my goat.
I think therefore nothing should be changed unless we universally agree what a marriage is and what it's good for. Until then I do think it should be war.
People cave in now just to be polite, but there has to be a vigorous debate on every topic, and since marriage is the very center of society, you can't just say anything goes, people.
Some people meet and in one day they run to the altar. The following day it's a divorce.
In Muslim countries such as Iran you can marry someone for an hour and do them in a motel, and turn them back in and say, we were married, it was fine. Harrumph.
Now MLK may not have stood for his shenanigans but he has to have approved them in his heart somewhere or else what moral standing has he got? He's still got plenty, but he's not on the penny. He would only adulterate the penny at this point, and defile its value. I do think he was basically a good man. But a bad bad husband.
We all have dreams.
Obama is a better husband it seems. We can't X-ray Michelle's heart, and so we don't know if she's just playing along to get the lobster quiche or whether her heart is in this presidency. No one will ever know.
JFK was certainly a louse. But at least Marilyn Monroe was well-read, probably better read than JFK, even if Marilyn Monroe had not read Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore was aware of JFK and Marilyn Monroe but they were not aware of her or were they? Did Marilyn Monroe ever make it with MLK? Did he ever fancy her? Did she him?
Maybe she was holding out for a president.
MLK wasn't even on the penny.
He did stand in front of the Lincoln Monument, and I think he used that memorial usefully, and added to its value.
It was a shame that the blacks couldn't vote in the south, or become well-educated. It's even now something holding them up, and I think it's that in too many cases their pants are falling down, but suspenders may not be the whole problem, it's the whole prison ethos, and the Stagolee mythos.
JFK had a better ideal as did MLK.
Maybe I shouldn't have run down Robert E. Lee but you have to pick your battles more carefully than he did Gettysburg in which he was clearly fighting on the wrong side. No matter how WELL he fought (what was Pickett's Charge if not a colossal blunder or some kind of Freudian slip before the letter to get his side destroyed, maybe he was secretly killing his men because he didn't believe in their cause).
Lincoln was in the right on every topic insofar as I know.
He had no slaves, he freed the slaves, he had nothing weird up his sleeves, and as a result he's on the penny permanently.
It's very hard to see one big virtue for the virtuous: no projects of what Martha Nussbaum calls, "violent group animosity" (Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, p. 28). The worst of course would be the Nazis. Or those who instantiate a genocide, as the Turks did against the Armenians, or the Timorese Muslims did against the timorous Christians on that island.
But feminism is basically involved in "violent group animosity" when it comes to a Dworkin or a McKinnon, and their hundreds of thousands of virulent followers. Early Malcolm X was this.
In India you have the Hindus putting in a violent project against the untouchables. It's enough to make you nuts to realize that people lived their entire lives without the ability to do anything but clean up the messes of others.
What was done to the slaves was that, too. Lincoln cleaned up that Augean stable left by the Founders as they needed the slaveowners to help them rid themselves of the aristocratic Brits and their lunatic, King George.
I don't see the Republicans as consolidating a hold on wealth. They are happy to accept newcomers and the nouveau riche and anyone who works hard whether it's on the basketball court or before a microphone even a rapper can join them (some have). James Brown was a Republican and a personal pal of Nixon's. Kerouac was a Republican. Marianne Moore was a Republican.
I am a Republican.
Thomas Sowell and Condi Rice are Republicans.
It's an open door, not a closed one.
The NAACP on the other hand is a closed door.
The Obamatons don't make clean calls on this topic. They think "the rich" are a fixed and closed door group which no one can join. Soon perhaps they will be exterminated, but not right now. You definitely don't have to be white to join the ranks of the upwardly mobile. You just don't a work ethic and a song, or a couple of moves that will get you to the hoop.
The lazy and the shiftless would rather start some kind of racket. That's the Nazis. Let's just kill and maim our way across the steppes and take everything we can get, and kill anyone and rape anything who stands against us.
This is why I think that Romney and MLK are ok. Maybe they each have some blindspots but they're not involved in taking someone else's stuff and calling it their own. Neither one ever said anything like that. Neither one ever preached hatred. It wasn't in their nature.
It's in Obama's nature. He hated Crowley instinctively. He hated Zimmerman instinctively. He may not have the deepest forms of resentment but he traffics in them. He traffics in them.
They are somehow his bread and butter and he knows how to manipulate his base by using them. He doesn't care about the truth. I think this is why he isn't a Christian. He senses the use-value of religion, but he's basically irreligious.
That's my take on him.
He presses buttons, but he is not called to be decent. His basic calling it to whatever is efficacious. He doesn't care what that is. He is what the Finns would call a skater.
A pond skater.
He goes over the surface of things and doesn't matter as long as he's going as far and as fast as he can. But there are no principles to this man. He will lie. He doesn't care at all what happened in Benghazi. It's a mess, but he doesn't really care.
Lincoln on the other hand cared.
That's why Lincoln is on the penny and Obama is fundamentally worthless.
I think it's also why MLK still matters. He did care. He was a flawed man, and no doubt deeply flawed, but he cared about one big thing: justice. He cared about children. He loved them and it hurt him to see their sorrow. He worked for others. This is why MLK is still a good man, and even though he doesn't belong on the penny, he isn't worthless. He is a valuable contribution to America.
I think MLK was a kind of opportunistic publicist.
It was all about photo-ops, and choosing the right moment to make your pitch.
He lobbied to become THE spokesperson for racial equality.
He had an ego too.
I just was never very impressed by him. He lacked subtlety.
I've never liked preachers. Unctuous. Performers.
Lots of good stuff. A few quick hits:
Curtis writes: I see a long trend beginning in the early '60's, starting with Goldwater, continuing through Nixon and Reagan to Bush I and Bush II. The conservative agenda was based on the idea that FDR and Eisenhower and Johnson were "socialists." Realizing that the old "business is good for America" routine wouldn't work, they aimed to create coalitions around hot-button "moral" issues which would appeal to Southerners and working-class whites.
I'm not sure I'm buying this in re: Bush I, who I see as an ideological successor to George Romney, and a moral interpolant between him and his son. That's to say, Bush I ran against the Goldwater know-nothings, as personified by Reagan, was co-opted by Reagan as his VP, and then given the opportunity to run as Reagan's successor. Along the way, he kind-of sort-of said the right things to pacify the know-nothings, but it was clear that his heart wasn't in it. Bush I also had the good luck to run against the weakest Democratic Presidential candidate of recent memory (Dukakis), and the bad luck to have to run for re-election against one of the strongest (Clinton). In that sense, Bush I is the Republican Party's Jimmy Carter.
Kirby writes: Humor is the ticket to the White House.
Reagan had it.
Goldwater didn't.
I think humor helps. I'm not entirely convinced it's necessary. (OK, how many of you think of Johnson, Nixon, Carter, or Bush I as comic? Ford too, but he doesn't count.)
Hillary would be fun to have run next time because she's the least consciously hilarious of all the pantsuits coming down the corridors of power with the possible exception of Pelosi.
Hmm. Hillary will run, unless health or politics intervenes. Nancy will not -- she's more like LBJ, at home in Congress, and the only path to the Presidency that makes sense is via the Vice-Presidency, and she's pushing too old for that.
But I'm thinking Michelle is going to run. The Obama campaign's "Organizing For America" is relaunched as "Organizing for Action," a 501(c)4,. The initial announcement came through this morning, with Michelle as the official spokesman. On one hand, I'm against dynastic democracy. On the other, she'd sure as heck stir things up, and I'm pretty sure she'd get jh's vote ;-). I predict that Michelle will be the name and face of some Obama Administration initiative in the next two years. Something that will get her out there more, and moreover something that they're going to be sure to win. They've not made the Clinton mistakes of putting her out to early, or in a cause too far.
In light of Curtis's remarks regarding Obama (that he's not really an African-American in the classical sense), I expect that a Michelle Obama Presidency would be even harder for the know-nothings to swallow.
And this brings me to a final point. The right analogy here is between Obama and Lincoln. I don't mean here to identify their presidential acts. Freeing the slaves and winning the civil war were much bigger deals than passing a universal health care law and unwinding a couple of foreign wars. Lincoln was the bigger deal. But I am thinking specifically in terms of the reactions of their opponents. Lincoln's election came over the objections of the slave powers. Their reaction to him was predicated less on who he was (and I'd go so far as to say his opponents made him who he was), than it was on their sense of loss of power. And they saw, clearly enough, that if they lost the power to dictate the presidency, then it was only a matter of time until they lost the power to protect their rights as slave owners. The out-of-scale reaction to Obama follows much the same dynamic. Indeed, if we add LBJ to list, then the successors of the slave powers have held the key to the Presidency since 1963. Like Lincoln's election, Obama's witnessed a fundamental change in the balance of power within the electorate.
Kirby,
Maybe I shouldn't have run down Robert E. Lee but you have to pick your battles more carefully than he did Gettysburg in which he was clearly fighting on the wrong side. No matter how WELL he fought (what was Pickett's Charge if not a colossal blunder or some kind of Freudian slip before the letter to get his side destroyed, maybe he was secretly killing his men because he didn't believe in their cause).
Bad staff work. That was the problem.
That and lying subordinates, particularly but not exclusively in Heath's Corp. The problem was that most of the units that made up Pickett's charge came from Heath's Corp, even though Longstreet was in command (Heath was injured). They'd been beaten up pretty badly during the first day's battle's. But, out of misguided pride or whatever, they tended to report a higher state of battle-readiness (both in terms of men available for combat, and morale) than they actually had. Suffice it to say that there are two monuments to the 22nd North Carolina on the field: one at Willoghby run, and one just north of the angle IIRC. Lee thought there were 15,000 men in the assaulting force. Modern estimates put the number at below 12,000. And no few of those 12,000 had minor injuries from the first day, and/or the memories of many fellow soldiers lost.
Just a quick note. It was the 26th North Carolina Regiment, not the 22nd.
Here are a couple of photos from Virtual Gettysburg:
26th North Carolina Infantry (above Willoghby Run)
26th North Carolina Infantry (north of the Angle)
Here are a couple of photos of mine:
26 North Carolina Regiment Marker, above Willoughby's Run
The Angle
I took these photos the last time I was on the field, in the summer of 2002. Note that my photo from inside the Angle shows the Pennsylvania 71st monument, which is visible behind the Virtual Gettysburg's image of the 26th North Carolina from outside the angle, offset by about 90º. The little stand of trees in front of the 71st Pennsylvania is not the famous "copse of trees." I have a three of images of them:
Pickett's Charge, "copse of trees" at center, from Pettigrew's start position
Pickett's Charge, towards "copse of trees", Coderi farm, from Virginia start position
"Copse of Trees," from Union salient inside angle
The first two images are particularly interesting, as they give some sense of the distance that Pickett's charge had to cover -- somewhat more than a mile, which is to say, roughly 12 minutes at a very brisk walk under cannon fire. Unfortunately, they don't give a particularly good sense of the terrain. The approaches to Pickett's charge were used as a tank training area during the interwar period, and this smoothed things out quite a bit.
Oy. More errata, now that I have sources and am not working from memory. None particularly significant except to a Civil War buff, but honesty compels.
Hill's corp, not Heth's (note spelling). Heth was a divisional commander under AP Hill.
Pettigrew commanded one of Heth's brigades. According to the wiki article, his brigade took 40%(!!) casualties dislodging the Union Iron Brigade from McPherson's Ridge (above Willoghby) on July 1st, and the 26th North Carolina was a constituent of Pettigrew's brigade. A modern rule of thumb is that any unit that takes 10% casualties needs serious R&R before it can function effectively. But Pettigrew's brigade was committed two days later to Pickett's charge. Pettigrew himself was badly wounded in the charge (a canister shot to the hand), and he died two weeks later protecting the Confederate retreat over the Potomac.
The staff issue is a common tragedy. The Confederates saw the Union Armies as over-staffed, and hidebound as a result. They were overmanned, and compensated with a lower officer/man ratio, higher mobility, and greater subunit independence. A consequence was that the Confederates were extremely lightly staffed. This caught up with them at Gettysburg. Lee knew that Longstreet's units took a beating on July 2nd (the famous assault up Emmitsburg Pike, leading to the destruction of Sickle's Corp and the defense of Little Round Top), and he knew that Early's division was mired in trench warfare at the top of the fishhook, just south of Gettysburg proper. But he did not know how badly damaged Hill's Corp was on July 1st.
Early's corp, not division.
A couple more photos:
Quickly rising ground above Willoughby's Run, below 26th North Carolina marker.
This gives a bit of a sense. That's about a 45º grade, and a 20' climb, from Willoghby up to the 26th NC Regimental Marker. At the top of that hill was the 24th Michigan Infantry:
24th Michigan Regimental Marker, above Willoughby Run
How good was the 24th? They were the funeral escort for Abraham Lincoln.
Stu what did you hope to learn is there a specific quesstion you had in mind?
i'd vote for michelle
if only for the fact that
she's got style
catholics are always trying to get a grasp on style
michelle sets the bar pretty high
michelle ma belle
these are words that go together well
tres bien ensemble
how do we get to gettysburg
i don't get it
re-enactments are surreal
no matter how you see it
jh
We got to Gettysburg by way of Lee, whom I defended indignantly when Kirby attempted to compare him to "Tammany" and corruption, a really stupid assertion.
The South lost the Civil War because they couldn't match the North's manufacturing base and greater numbers. They never had a chance. What made the Civil War so devastating was the growing realization as it continued that since both sides were stubborn, only a "convincing" victory would decide the outcome, so both sides became more determined and cruelly ruthless. The South was unable to mount the sort of invasion that Sherman did.
Lee seems like a figure as heroic almost as Lincoln. Why and how do you take up a losing cause, with dignity, especially when you don't believe in the cause yourself. It's truly tragic. Civil Wars are terrible. My people--Wisconsonians--fought for the Union.
Lincoln Lee MLK JFK all somewhat lead us too to the Gettysburg Address and the Dream speech that MLk gave - possibly the most important political speech ever given by a non president in American history. That speech moved mountains and finished the job that Lincoln set in motion and whoch goes back to our Founding and the dreams of equality that are already mentioned in the Constitutipn and back further to Locke and Jefferson Luther and Jesus and Paul and back to Moses. It positioned itself brilliantly. What Lee tried valiantly but vainly to stop and which MLK's assassination failed to stop also has another illegitimate lineage which is that of Marxism and the one sided viciousness of the Panthers and their crazed hippy corollaries who liked Ho. I accept the CHRISTIAN provenance of MLK but not the socialist side or the sexual communism that he and the hippies and Marx were about.
Republican strategists have apparently realized they could tap into white southern bitterness over the War of Southern Stupidity and Stubborness which they call the War of Northern Aggression by getting southernors to think of the problems of bussing and Affirmative Action which attempt to address inequality but do so in a very clumsy and vicious way that disrupts communities and is fundamentally unfair and not well thought out. So we win the south as almost a given but lose the northeast and California. Tammany was a machine for winning elections through giveaways tonthe Irish and other malcontents by promising work and lunches. Both sides play this game butbthe Democrats are far better at it but are bankrupting the nation through Fannie and Freddie and now Obamacare. We have always been divided into factions but now each sside thinks only of itself and demonizes the other. Even here we see this Civil War continue. How do we get Americans to think of America? We donn't even know who is an American any more. The Spanish wars too continually threaten our heritage and our sense of unity. History is never over.
Kirby,
Yeah, I was taking on your hypothesis that Pickett's charge was some sort of punishment Lee imposed on his men. Given what he knew (and I'd say there were at least three crucial things he didn't know), Pickett's charge had better than even odds.
He'd attacked on the wings the day before, and the Union had reinforced the wings. Ergo, the center was weak. Moreover, the "copse of trees" occurs at a relatively low spot on Cemetery Ridge, and the small stone wall notwithstanding, the ground provided the Union much less of an advantage in the center than the flanks.
A breakthrough at the center would have trapped the northern wing of the Union Army between Early and Longstreet, and changed the balance of power between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Virginia. So what didn't Lee know?
1) He thought he had 15,000 combat ready, rather than 12,000, many of whom were still shaken from their fights on the 1st. Put another 3,000 Confederates inside the Angle, and it's better than even odds that Hancock's corp breaks.
2) He didn't know about the re-supply problems with his own artillery. This would have left a hypothetical break-through force extremely vulnerable to counter-attack. And the one downside of engaging the Union army at the center was that pretty much all of the Union artillery came into play.
3) He didn't know that Sedgwick's corp was in defilade behind Cemetery Ridge, and constituted an available reserve for Meade. Had Lee broken through at the angle, Meade would have used Sedgwick to counter-attack, and would have had overwhelming numbers of infantry and an overwhelming advantage in artillery. Meade wouldn't have pressed the counter-attack beyond restoring the line at Cemetery Ridge, but that would have been enough.
I my point is that Pickett's charge wasn't irrational or defeat seeking given what Lee knew.
In re: Curtis's points. I've often heard the Union advantage in manufacturing cited, but I'm hard pressed to think of a battle where the Confederacy ran out of guns or ammo. Isolated units, sure. But corps? No, at least, not before Sayler's Creek, and it was all but over then. They seemed to do a pretty good job of resupply by taking their opponents weapons when possible.
The numbers difference was clearly important, but the South functioned as a military dictatorship throughout the war, and as a result had consistently much higher manpower utilization. The Union wasn't really able to exploit its man-power advantages until it shut down the exchanges.
Lee's big mistake came late in the war. He saw his duty as screening Richmond. Grant knew the that real objective was Lee's army. Once Grant realized that Lee was going to defend Richmond and its approaches at all hazards, he used that against him, forcing Lee first to give up mobility, and secondly to over-extend his lines to screen the rail junction at Petersburg.
Kirby,
Republican strategists have apparently realized they could tap into white southern bitterness over the War of Southern Stupidity and Stubborness which they call the War of Northern Aggression
That's the Southern Strategy in a nutshell. Even though the R's provided most of the votes for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, LBJ's aggressive backing created an opportunity that Nixon took advantage of.
I'd argue that the Republican Party has been functioning since the 60's as an application of the Stockholm Syndrome -- it's been lead by the bosses, who have kept wages low by convincing the conservative southern whites that Nixon brought into the party that their economic future was imperiled by blacks, Mexicans, etc. It's voting power is a function of its ability to inspire fear in its willing hostages.
So we win the south as almost a given but lose the northeast and California.
Pretty much. Back in the day, the Republican Party dominated in the North, and the Democratic Party in the South. This flipped with the dominance of the Goldwater-Nixon wing within the Republican Party.
How do we get Americans to think of America? We donn't even know who is an American any more
Is America a little raft, or a big one (to put it in Buddist terms)? I'd say that it's a big raft, and moreover that we sink or swim together. I don't think that the white man's prosperity must necessarily come at the expense of the black or brown man, or woman, nor conversely.
Recent studies of social mobility in the US point out that our national myth of advancement by merit has very little truth in it any more. There is no more social mobility here than in the UK. But I think the national myth, false though it may be in practice, is still a good myth, and a myth that should inform and inspire us.
And I think this is what you don't get. The issue from the liberal side isn't that there are rich and poor, it's that the rich are the sons of the rich, and the poor are the sons of the poor. Inequality may well be in the nature of things, but it should be a reflections of essentials of character, ability, and application, and not of accidents of birth. Thus, our key political objective isn't to defend wealth, it's to defend mobility.
joe the plumber cries out
spread it around
:)
jh
There was a neat show on the Military Channel that the North had inteloigence about Pickett's Charge and were ready for it.
I might grant that some elementsnof the Republican Party vote against perceived disadvantages due to Affirmative Action and perhaps a long delayed resentment going back to slavery. The Dems also use resentment about the rich to foment hatred. Both sides use it. I don't see Romney using that and I don't see MLK using that. Obama uses it masterfully and continually.
Hitler of course used it. George Wallace used it.
Then he was sorry after he got shot.
I still think that anybody who mobilizes factions through resentment os playing a dangerous . game. Whether it's feminists and their foam and wombs with a view or Panthers or KKK it's a sick game to play. We ought to talk about fair rules for all. The Dems don't even try to do that any longer in their Resentment Studies classes. It's a big part of why I bolted.
Kirby,
So, you don't think that the 47% remark was about fomenting resentment?
Well, one resentment creates another. I suppose at this point the resentment game is something like ping pong. I think he was trying to say that the chances of his winning when there are already so many voters who are locked by virtue of entitlements is staggering and that they need every vote on his side to possibly win and thus have at least a prayer of reducing government giveaways.
I know that many Democrats don't see themselves or their party as having a direct provenance via Tammany, but most conservatives do see it that way. There are of course the superrich who can use the government to build tax loopholes for themselves, or so I've heard. Goldman Sachs may go so far as to get a bailout in return for some kind of a kickback in terms of campaign contributions.
I don't think there is anything like a corruption index that is unbiased that would stack Republicans up against Democrats and independents and give us the straight dope on which party has been more corrupt on a historical and a contemporary basis.
I yawned when I saw that Mayor Nagins was arrested for taking bribes in New Orleans for the year of the Katrina cleanup. That's partially New Orleans, and partially I could see that Nagins was one of those politicians who screams about corruption but is himself corrupt. It's a Democratic type: Spitzer is another member of that club.
How large a set of either party belongs in that club probably could not be adduced without bias. My own corruption index of course clocks Democrats far more frequently. Lies and coverups and Big Brother type news and bearing false witness.
But we do tend to see the mote in the others' eyes. When I was a Democrat I tended to see this far more often in the Republicans. Part of it is I used to listen exclusively to NPR and only read radical newspapers.
Now I read WSJ and listen to Fox.
Kirby,
Well, one resentment creates another.
So much for the moral high ground.
There's a type of Democrat I find very funny. The feminist who hates male chauvinists but is certain that women are superior. The feminist who hates it when men date college kids but that do it themselves (this was rampant in my undergraduate school, where they went so far as to pass a law against harassment that only applied to men, or so they believed -- it later turned out to apply to one of their number who had bedded scores of students over the decades but was stunned that it applied to her, and the faculty felt sorry for her and she was not sanctioned).
There is also racist Spike Lee who believes that only whites can be racist (has he ever taken back that remark?).
Of course the whole point of the Japanese culture at the time of WWII is that they were racially superior and so deserved to lord it over all of Asia, and ultimately all of humanity. But only the Nazis catch heck for this.
Corruption and self-interest are everywhere. Few rise above it. Those who do, are almost exclusively Republican. Lincoln, for one. George Bush, for another.
If Jesus were alive today He would be a Republican.
Kirby,
There's a type of Democrat I find very funny. The feminist who hates male chauvinists but is certain that women are superior.
Kind of like the rich dude who hates academics because his currency won't buy what they have.
Of course the whole point of the Japanese culture at the time of WWII is that they were racially superior and so deserved to lord it over all of Asia, and ultimately all of humanity. But only the Nazis catch heck for this.
True enough, but I think the difference is that Japanese racism in the Pacific was returned in the same coin by the Americans. Our pedestal there is a lot shakier. Read "War without Mercy" someday. It does a very effective job of documenting racism on both sides.
Corruption and self-interest are everywhere. Few rise above it. Those who do, are almost exclusively Republican. Lincoln, for one. George Bush, for another.
Ridiculous tripe, even for you.
Is not.
Wow, I never knew what an echo chamber sounded like until I happened upon your blog, Kirby. Thanks for the laughs!
Oh the main echo is probably Reinhold Niebuhr at least from my side. He is the true thinker behind MLK, and much else. You don't see him mentioned as often as he once was. If Lutheranism has one figure who influenced the mainstream of America, I'd say it was him. Not exactly a surrealist, he was though very careful in his thinking. Here you can see a video of him talking with Mike Wallace in 1958! He discusses communism, atheism, the problem of Bertrand Russell, and whether God is on our side:
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/niebuhr_reinhold.html
Oh, he also contributed one short sentence that also echoes in many bedrooms across America as we say our nightly prayers. It's the famous "Serenity Prayer," which Niebuhr first set down on the back of an envelope as he prayed for God to deliver us from the MAD of the Cold War atomic period.
I understand Joe Miller completely.
Kirby's a mouthpiece for Republican strategy.
It seemed quite improbable to me, until I realized that Kirby had run from inclusion and diversity into small town/small mindedness. He equates the deprivation of consciousness and intellectual isolation with virtues, and thus fulfills the Republican appeal to frustrated excluded white men who feel threatened by all kinds of intruders and outsiders.
The best thing about America was its social and economic mobility, which Stu reminds us of.
But that mobility and opportunity needs to be guided by laws and regulation. Granting corrupt rich guys unfettered access to capital and property and the instruments of usury is a recipe for oligarchy--as it exists in South America. Calling that corruption "freedom" is a joke.
Why would the majority of Americans ever support that, assuming they realized what was actually being said in the media.
I wish the talk shows would simply define terms, instead of throwing generalities around for effect.
"Entitlements" has literally nothing to do with how it's used on radio and television. And that's because someone benefits from our ignorance.
Ignorance: It's the raw material of Fox News.
It's easier to see the stars in small towns.
Niebuhr opens with a ten minute defense of Catholicism as Wallace tries to diss Catholics by saying that they are secretly enrolled by the Pope to do his will. Niebuhr says he had voted for Alfred E. Smith in 1928 and would vote for another such Catholic in a twinkling if called upon (this was just before Kennedy). Niebuhr also says the Catholics are American Catholics, which means they have our ideals enshrined within their foreheads along with the stars and stripes and the bugles and taps pertaining.
But the neatest part for me is when he talked about whether or not God is on our side. He said no, God in the OT is not really on the side of the Jews. He has His own side, His own court, and if the Jews aren't playing ball in that court, He ignores them, and their society can go to Hell.
I think this is right on the money.
Curtis,
While I think there is some truth to your analysis of Kirby, I have a few reservations.
Kirby's a mouthpiece for Republican strategy.
Not exactly. I'd note that Kirby's more environmentalist, less enamored of the Iraq war, and more paranoid that the Republican Party generally.
It seemed quite improbable to me, until I realized that Kirby had run from inclusion and diversity into small town/small mindedness.
I'm not sure that you have cause and effect right here, which isn't to deny that there is a link between conservative views and rural zip codes, or that that link may be influencing his views. On one hand, I'll note that finding an academic job isn't easy, especially in English. I'll be that Kirby moved to Delhi as a result of being hired at SUNY Dehli, and that his options might have involved institutions set in equally bucolic settings.
Kirby,
Niebuhr opens with a ten minute defense of Catholicism as Wallace tries to diss Catholics by saying that they are secretly enrolled by the Pope to do his will.
Niebuhr is channelling Bonhoeffer here.
But the neatest part for me is when he talked about whether or not God is on our side. He said no, God in the OT is not really on the side of the Jews. He has His own side, His own court, and if the Jews aren't playing ball in that court, He ignores them, and their society can go to Hell.
I think this is right on the money.
Something we agree on. Or as I've been taught, we should never pray that God will be on our side, but instead that we might be on his.
Stu thank you for setting the record straight with regard to the choices available to me. I got incredibly lucky to be in NY State, as I had applied to virtually every college with an opening from the Tex-Mex border to the Republic or whatever it is of The Gambia.
As it turned out, I found a very good position in a rural college about 2.5 hours' drive from NYC, and about an hour north of Binghamton, NY, and an hour south of Albany, NY. Housing prices are reasonable here. We have a one-acre yard with a slope that allows the children to take coasters down. The local school is excellent, although like everywhere else, there is rampant drug use in the high schools and there have been reports of orgies among the students.
Goodness gracious.
The church we ended up in is excellent, though we need more members. I am trying to enroll a few more colleagues and their families if I can talk them around.
I definitely did apply to city colleges all over the country when I first applied. There were openings even at the U. of Chicago and throughout the Boston area. I have no idea how we could have afforded a house in those areas. We have four bedrooms, and sit in a great neighborhood, and have a view overlooking an undeveloped mountain that largely belongs to the NYC water department.
In Boston or Providence such a house would cost at least 700 thousand dollars, and that doesn't include the frightful yearly school and local taxes.
We have a grocery store (two) several adequate restaurants, a Main St. with some Victorian and Georgian style homes, a river (the Delaware) running through and almost all of our neighbors are conscientious with their children, and attend churches.
There are no drive-bys, and no prostitution (that I know of), and we have five different police forces in the town (university, county, town, state troopers, and even a little-known but quite active environmental police force, and even a NYC water department police force, that you almost never see, but in fact counts for a sixth police force).
I love it here.
I like all but one of my colleagues (she yells), and I love the students and the administration (almost all are Democrats, but they put up with me for the most part, and I try not to foreground my differences too much, but do find a few others around here who share my viewpoint and are as afraid of Obama and "collective action" -- which really means mob action incited from above and blow as in the lawless 99% "occupy" groups, which had no legal right to do what they did but which were still encouraged by the president himself -- but there are some of us at least who still believe in law and order for everybody -- including the crazy president and his cabinet of nutty squirrels and his increasingly erratic judges for whom law itself appears to be an afterthought.
(Sotomayor's autobiography is all personal stuff, and doesn't even talk about case law at all, apparently.)
This is a beautiful place. You can google it and find the New York Times' photo essay from a few years' back if you want to take a look at it.
I absolutely love this place and all the people here.
I'm frightened to go out of the town as I feel the presence of Sasquatch and mountain lions and a very strange creature that I've seen a few times -- it appears in the road without a clear body but has a spectral shadowy self and seems to stretch across the roads at twilight to waylay travellers but so far has yet to actually injure anyone so far as I know. Whatever that thing is, it has no name, and as far as I know, only my wife and kids and I have even seen it.
I am terrified to go on the backroads as a result of this strange creature. What the heck is it?
Whatever it is, it's almost fifty feet in length and has a body that may be immaterial! It's head seems to be able to rotate at a 360 degree angle. I don't think it would be possible to fight with it. It might be just an illusion of some kind that is created by the shadowy clouds that form at the bases of hollows. That's where I mostly see it, and usually right at twilight. I've been trying not to mention this thing to anyone. But my kids and wife have also seen it. We've driven the car right through it on several occasions and it appears to give way without a thump.
I wonder if others around here have seen it. Maybe none of us want to appear to be nuts. There are all kinds of people who live here. The art critic for the New Yorker (Peter Schjeldahl) lives here. Many academics retire up here. One of the editors of New Directions lives here. The editors of a famous poetry publishing house live here. Rock critics, and many hundreds of other people live here. You don't see them very often, as they stick to themselves, but there are famous Icelandic painters, and German artists, and a retired French judge. This is not by any means a lonely outpost along the Tex-Mex border replete with bugs and scorpions.
It's a neat place. But it does get lonely and weird, and there is that strange creature along the roads that no one has ever named. This is the first time I've spoken about it outside of our family's experience. It reminds me somewhat of whatever that thing is in Predator but insofar as I know, it's benign.
Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer were very close friends for years. They probably channeled one another quite a bit. Tillich was also friends with these two. They formed quite a brilliant trio. The one I've read least is Bonhoeffer, though did see the wonderful documentary about his attempt on Hitler's life which was funded by a Lutheran group. It appeared to my amazement on the PBS channel a few years during one of the funding drives when they temporarily lift restrictions against Christian content.
Kirby:
I'm listening just now to a selection of Grieg's piano pieces, which remind me of the sweetness and virtue of good rural people living lives of quiet, but intense, desperation. Lots of lyrical eroticism under the surface of the pale ruffles and manly flannel.
Peter Schjeldahl was a bonafide 2nd Generation New York School Poet before he became an art critic. I always liked his "White Country" collection (Totem/Coriinth), with its section of imitation Berrigan sonnets.
I understand completely why you've chosen to live where you do, though using the price of housing as a pretext is a bit of dishonesty. lf you really wanted to live in a suburb of Boston or Philadelphia, I'm sure you would, whatever the inconvenience. I've thought that had we raised our son in a similar circumstance, he wouldn't have strayed into the world that eventually killed him. But I could never have lived in a tiny college town--I'd have died of boredom and isolation, no kidding.
Write your lonely and forsaken poems. That's what you were meant to do.
Kirby - any indication of its general shape?
You're saying it's fifty feet long, with a head that swivels like an owl.
Are we talking a huge manbeast? A dinosaur? A massive Elk God?
Does it look like Karl Rove?
I mean, he shows up on Southwest flights, perhaps he's an immaterial shadowcreature just lost in the lonely wilderness of upstate NY.
I would assume that what you are seeing = nuttin' but shadows.
Or that you're going insane - but if your family saw it too, then my guess is still on the shadows.
Why didn't you get out of your car to investigatE?
Brett we're driving 60 mph. It's so quick and we all turn and look after we saw.it. Did you see that? It's very hard to describe. It is a life form. Maybe it's the CHTULU. I wish I knew. It terrifies me that it's stalking us. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this? I feel weird talking about it.
My wife said it looks like a greyhound but is more spectral and lots bigger. Not the bus but the dogged dog. She thinks 50 ft. is too big. She says 30 ft. Its awareness of us is uncertain. think we shoild organize a hunting party.
Like all reports of such sightings, the circumstances are questionable.
You saw it for--what?--a fraction of a second? It was moving at improbable speed toward the forest?
Was it twilight or later?
Sightings of the Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster all share that degree of vagueness.
There's that silly photo of a turtle head taken at about 1000 feet--purportedly.
What you probably saw was a deer, moving rapidly. Perhaps in a highlight. Or a headlight.
i know of a whole clan of little people who stand merely 1 ft. tall their children are half that size but in every other respect they are identical to modern humans...they camp under sagebrush
nature hath stranger things
than textbooks show
i think i went to highschool with susquatczh
jh
jh
It came across the road in front of our car at twilight the first time. Freakily fast, but almost immaterial. We were coming down a long mountain called Franklin Mountain and at a sharp turn over a very short bridge it passed in front of the car.
Another time again as we were about to pass a bridge, a very small bridge the kind for a culvert to allow a small stream to pass under the roadway.
It occurred to me that it could be some kind of steam from the stream that had gathered, but it was high summer in each case.
Very hard to determine what it is, or was. It did seem to have eyes, but the tendency to anthropomorphize a strange glob of mist is always there. It wasn't far from the car. Twenty feet at most in the first instance and about a hundred feet in the second.
It makes you wonder. But on the other hand the imagination can play tricks.
People might think Obama is a good guy for instance, or that he's human...
It came across the road in front of our car at twilight the first time. Freakily fast, but almost immaterial. We were coming down a long mountain called Franklin Mountain and at a sharp turn over a very short bridge it passed in front of the car.
Hmm.... The fact that you were turning quickly is very suspicious. Was the movement actual or only apparent? I'm thinking here that there was an unexpected source of illumination (say, the sun through a notch in the mountain), creating a kind of corpuscular ray, which appeared to move because you were turning.
I like this. How could I find a further definition. I think you have something here Stu. Thank you.
There may have also nbeen a ray of light as there is a gap in the trees there where the stream cuts across or under the road bed. It may have been compounded by a dirty windshield. Both instances were at twilight which is a tricky time plus the car was going at least sixty in both instances.
I like this. How could I find a further definition. I think you have something here Stu. Thank you.
Kirby,
Wiki: Crepuscular rays. From Google, I'm not the only one to screw this up. Here are some images. If you look at the pictures, I suspect you'll recognize the phenomenon.
My thinking is that what you're actually seeing is an anticrepuscular ray, which is nothing more than a crepuscular ray seen looking away from the sun, projected only to land. If seen at twilight, the ray's color might bend towards orange/red, and moreover might "dance around" a bit due to turbulence. Anticrepuscular rays aren't often noticed -- our eyes are drawn naturally to the brighter crepuscular ray on the opposite side of the horizon.
My thinking here is Bayesian. There is a tiny probability that you're seeing something truly new, vs. a merely small probability that you're misidentifying a well-known phenomenon. Small beats tiny, and so the odds still favor something known over something unknown. The fact that the "being" seemed immaterial tends to argue for an optical illusion of some kind.
This could be it. The timing coincides. As we turned we went under a canopy of trees at about 8 pm and turned and the phenomenon seemed to flash in front of the car at great speed and we all gasped certain it was a being. /'ve never been quite content with this explanation. Because in some way i felt it was ON the windshield or that the windshield (which wasn't clean) either partially produced or magnified the effect. The other time this happened we were coming back frrom Lola's play again at twilight and in a stand of golden and yellow trees was a.blast of weirdly bent light which reminded me of scenes in Predator when they are shooting in the trees and a force shield is bending the visual reception of the trees. Still not sure but I am nudged in the direction of crepuscularity. A term I had never heard!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h77P4aXLr7c
who's to say there are no ghosts in new york state i mean thousands of seneca indians cannot be wrong
aliens
has anyone considered aliens
there are good ghosts
consider caspar
yo jh
I ran the logic past my wife who said it was solid not immaterial. It was at least as wide as the car and looked likena huge greyhound. I was driving and thinking about a problem having to do with the interpretation of a phrase in Hayek about how much government can afford to jand out to the por amd wondering if a specific percentage of GNP should be set aside for the unproductive and only saw it tangentially. It almost flew whatever it was. Too dark to be a deer. Bear? Wolf? She claimed its skeleton was visible. But that it was black. It's hard to get her or the kids to talk about it because they are terrified.
Kirby,
Working on the highly plausible assumption that your wife's powers of observation are superior to yours, I'm thinking you saw a moose. They are surprising large animals if you've never seen one (males can weight 1500 lbs., and be almost 7' tall). They're diurnal, which is consistent with a twilight sighting. They are very dark.
You're a bit south of the range for moose, but not so far as to make in impossible, and in terrain that makes it more rather than less plausible.
Google Image: Female moose.
More evidence for the moose hypothesis. A quick google search indicates (a) that the moose is extending its range to the south (probably less hunting pressure), and (b) that there are plenty of moose sightings well south of you.
You'll want to be alert for them. You sure don't want to hit one with your car. And if they get angry, they can get aggressive. I heard a story in an Alaskan bar. The bartender was driving his snow machine (they don't say snow mobile in Alaska) down a path, and encountered a moose that had been chased one time too many down that path by other snow machines. The moose charged, and he ran away. The moose proceeded to stomp the snow machine flat, making for an interesting conversation with his insurance agent.
There are moose in the Adirondacks. Some have argued that they should be reintroduced to the Catskills, too, along with wolves and cougars. We have an incredibly strange situation here with incredibly large areas of undeveloped land that belongs largely to the NYC water department. And millions of acres (I think it's that much) have been set aside. But the land is in strange parcels that are geometric figures that resemble airports with odd strips jutting out, surrounded by farmland or other wild land, or sometimes developments.
So the environment is jagged and doesn't have much continuity. It could nevertheless have been a moose. It was QUITE big. I'll run this hypothesis past Riikka and the kids and get back to you. They have moose in Finland (you'd think the plural would be meese, on the model of goose, or even mice, but I don't think it's mooses -- although I do think their closest relative is the deer, and isn't the plural of deer still deer, or is it deers, while bear becomes bears, and beer, beers!?).
So many things to look up and verify because these things tend to be so idiomatic in implementation.
Still, I like the moose theory!
There are 264,000 moose in Finland. There they call them elk. But they are basically what we call a moose, although they are a slightly separate species (theirs are smaller and are thought to be unable to mate with ours since a moose generally gets a female through banging their antlers with another male, and unless we have a really tough Finnish moose, you'd think they'd loose, or get such brain damage they couldn't continue -- like a linebacker weighing only 180 pounds up against one of ours weighing 300 pounds and from some place like Samoa).
She would recognize a moose.
Here's from Wiktionary about the plural of moose:
"The use of moose in the plural is sometimes problematic. The regularly formed plural, mooses, is by now rare and its use may be regarded as irksome and uneuphonious. The form meese—formed by analogy with goose → geese—will in most cases be greeted with a snigger, and is thus generally only appropriate in humorous contexts; even pragmatics notwithstanding, because moose has Algonquian origins—wholly unrelated to the Germanic roots of goose, on whose pattern the plural meese is formed—a strong declension plural form is etymologically inconsistent. The etymologically consistent plural form would be *mosinee,[2] but this plural form sees no use in English. In ordinary common usage, moose is treated as an invariant noun, which means its plural is also moose (as with the names of many animals, such as deer and fish, which are also invariant); however, this usage can sometimes be considered stilted when a group of more than one moose are considered individually, in which case avoidance of the plural may be the best option, necessitating the employment of a circumlocution."
Just looked up Moose in the Catskills and there have been many sightings by hunters and some from drivers over the years. One was even seen in NJ and reported in the papers there. This is becoming more and more plausible.
I just have to run it by Riikka, who's busy today. I know she's seen moose in Finland. Ours are of course a heck of a lot bigger but even there if you hit one you're usually dead. Some of their singers are forced to go very far in the winters between gigs and they have been known to hit a moose in the dead of night.
It's a real problem. They often weigh over a thousand pounds so it's like hitting another car almost. I think we may be on to something, but I have to check with her. As you said, she is far more observant than I am. The kids are too.
I am always off in my head somewhere thinking about something else. Once she redesigned the entire house and I didn't even notice for two days.
I'd thought about Elk as an alternative, but decided that (a) Elk look a lot more deer-like than moose, and (b) the modern range for Elk doesn't list any reasonably nearby population. I was surprised (stunned might be closer) to see that central Michigan is included in the modern range. I've been over that part of the country a lot, including camping and hiking, and I never encountered one.
But moose... moose don't look like deer. Elk look like large, fat deer. The family resemblance is clear. Moose look like something that you'd encounter in the "Extinct megafaunta" section of a natural history textbook.
Riikka's comment: a moose is too big for what this was. Unless it was an adolescent moose. However, it was extremely speedy, and ran faster than a normal creature ciulf. It almost flew.
I'm thinking female moose. Adolescent is certainly possible.
Once you get down to 500lbs or less, black bear becomes plausible. I've seen some pretty mangy looking bear.
Wrinkle. My daughter Lola who is 13 said it was a "heavy cloud" and was NOT a creature. She said it did NOT touch the ground. My wife on the other hand says it ran and was as big as the car. I trust the wife's perception. Lola believes it was supernatural.
Both agree it was less than one yard from the car.
I think I agree with Stu - this seems to be a 'trust your wife' situation.
You have an overactive imagination, and any 13-year-old would have the same.
Your wife is Finnish, and not a weirdo poetry prof., so I assume she is far more pragmatic and reasonable than you are (which is doubly proved by the reasonable responses she makes to your surreal righty facebook posts).
I agree with Stu - probably a Moose, that, due to some quirk of the way you were traveling or turning seemed to be moving at an incredible speed.
(Though moose move at 35mph, nothing to be laughed at).
She said its skeleton was visible - like, that she could see the white of the bone? Like Skeletor?
Or that she could see the bone through the skin, like me with my chicken legs?
Because moose definitely have that scrawny-ness to them sometimes, especially in the leg area.
So, you have two options:
a) Moose.
b) Alien.
(By the way, I think the 'trying to figure out what weird creature Kirby and his family saw' topic is my favoritest topic we've had in a long long time).
I once saw a heifer moose in Alaska get spooked, and take off up the side of a mountain. She was at an awkward age -- the equivalent of a 14 year old human girl, showing signs of puberty but not quite there yet. She had adult height, but nothing like adult weight, skinny, pinched at the waist, big chest but no fat on it. But she hauled ass up that mountain, and it was a big ass.
I remember when I was a boy we used to go "motoring" in the evening after dinner. This was a tradition that you don't hear much about any more. In the Bay Area, we'd go up Mount Tamalpais, for instance. Later, when we moved to Napa, we'd go driving up on Atlas Peak Road, a steep rural route along the Eastern side of the Valley.
Once, just after twilight, we came around a turn and our headlights were pointed directly into the face of a huge guard dog, whose eyes glowed intensely. If you've ever seen animal eyes reflect bright artificial light back at you, you'll understand the phenomenon. We all practically jumped out of our seats. It made the dog seem very large, and frightening.
I remember another time, crossing a narrow log bridge along the Klamath River as a boy, encountering a wild pig heading straight for me. He had that kinky thatched hair sticking up out of his back, and he scared the bejeesus out of me. But he seemed as disconcerted as I was, and turned around and scooted away.
I think, seeing an animal in the wild, can often cause the mind to conjure up imagery spontaneously.
On the other hand, Kirby may need to believe in ghosts to buttress his religious fantasies about divine inspiration. The holy spirit works in strange ways. Maybe it's sending him coded messages in the form of animal spirits.
But what can it mean? (That's fodder for a future post.)
the aliens are here
Ok, we're down to moose and alien or perhaps some kind of evil spectre, perhaps the ghost of communism past.
Without live footage, we'll never know. And we're unlikely to get it. So, unless one of us in hypnosis gets a more specific image (the wife being the only reliable witness) then we'll just have to leave it at that.
Thanks for this discussion, guys.
Post a Comment