It's my favorite thing about blogging, and today's occurrence was just about exactly perfect.
Following my normal approach to blogging, I found a NYT piece about Dolly Parton and wrote about her interest in the children's book "The Little Engine That Could." I said: "It's the book she wants all kids to read. I can't imagine a left-leaning person saying that."
3 posts later, I was writing about the deceased ex-CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, whose friend declared that he was like The Giving Tree. I didn't think that was quite right: "The Giving Tree was giving — sacrificing to provide the boy with benefits. Hsieh's sacrifices did not give anyone else anything but merely pared away from the person making the sacrifices."These are 2 quite different children's books, but look. Shel Silverstein — author of "The Giving Tree" — wrote his own version of "The Little Engine That Could." I love when things come together like that.
AND: Less serendipitous but very interesting is this Eminem song that uses "The Little Engine That Could":He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!He slid down and mashed into engine hashOn the rocks below... which goes to showIf the track is tough and the hill is rough,THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
The writing is plainly brilliant, but it's very dark. Lyrics here. Key line: "I think I can, I think I can/I know I can, psycho I am."
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50 comments:
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
No one said thinking you can is ever enough. That just leaves you sitting in your chair doing nothing else.
Right-thinking people know it's necessary but not sufficient.
Then you move on to the next stanza beloved of The Gods of the Copybook Headings :
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again."
Very familiar to entrepreneurs, who very rarely succeed on their first, second or third attempt.
That's why you need help from the collective. As a member of the 'People,' the best and brightest will see to your needs in the collective.
Community is what counts, and the radical intellectuals who see a new vision will lead the working classes and oppressed minorities to a new tomorrow.
Most(S)cience is settled, and our progress means a new Ethics, new Empathy, and new Rules are required.
Equality, Empathy, and the Environment are next. Liberate yourselves.
Namaste.
-Chase Weller-Wells. Thinker, Doer, Intellectual.
"If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!"
So give it a try, but if you fail, no worries.
Daddy government will be there for you.
Always.
“The Rainbow Fish” falls into this same genre of stories about selfishness/selflessness....
That ending sucks, Shel.
Stories aren’t supposed to be realistic or set our expectations appropriately. Stories are to inspire us and empower us with belief.
Ever heard of affirmations, Shel? Probably not. Too positive and empowering for a guy like you.
The rest, and more important part, of the story (at least the Wally Piper one we have), is a retelling of the Good Samaritan. There were 3 bigger trains refused to help before the Little Engine offered to help. It was less about “thinking you can” than trying to help. Reducing it to “You Can Do It!” Is empty self-esteem boost nonsense.
Tootle is the definitive engine for kids.
It's wonderful that we all end up in the same place. If you don't try or "think you can" then of course you will fail. Our children need to hear this message.
Today there should be a Tootle simulator game, with guns and rockets.
There is nothing better than telling kids "if you try, you will fail, so why try"! What an uplifting outlook on life!
Which is why it is wise to make sure you get job as a government employee, a K-12 union teacher, or a tenured university professor. In any of these positions, you don't have to perform. You don't even have to do well at your job. You just have to show up, sometimes. No thinking you can, no worry about failure, just...show up. They can't let you go. They have to keep you.
No sweat.
Good thing the others are there to pay for it.
I may have earned myself a trip to the penalty box.
So, the Little Engine crashed and burned. Lesson: no good can come from trying. That's "realism" Ann? Wow.
Better just light up a doobie and chill, man. No wonder there's so many young men mooching on our streets, they've been carefully trained not to even bother trying from early youth. No Point du Hoc for them.
Sounds like time to deploy TR once more:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I always gave up before the end of the Thomas story.
Narr
He seemed like a jerk
The "I think I can" philosophy is liberal. It's why conservatives men are marginally more successful than Women in the arts, inventions, sciences and cutting edge technology. Notice I didn't mention engineering. Jordan Peterson 101. Traits openness and extraversion.
"I may have earned myself a trip to the penalty box."
But well-earned, my son...well-earned.
Bruno ("The Uses of Enchantment") Bettleheim hated "The Little Engine That Could."
He thought it was too superficial and failed to address children's underlying anxieties, such as being kidnapped, eaten, or losing a parent.
In THE FOUNTAINHEAD, the villainous King of All Statist Media, Ellsworth Toohey, promotes a book called "The Gallant Gallstone," which is like the collectivist rebuttal to fables of individualism. Sounds like the kind of book little Ingas and little Howards would clamor for at Story Time. "please, Story Lady, read me the one about the Gallant Gallstone! When I grow up I don't want to be anything but an obedient serf!"
I’m not convinced that “The Little Engine that Could” is a right wing book. When Yoda says “Do, or do not, there is no try”, that makes Ayn Rand look like a Pansy.
The Shel Silversteins of the world are sitting back in the cave entrance, scratching themselves, and saying, "So you call it a wheel. So what?"
Silverstein was Playboy's favorite cartoonist. The phoney sophistication. The lightly held cynicism. The inability to make a commitment to another human being. The moral ambiguity. What more need be said?
Here's the left wing solution--always: get the government to do it. Lefties are never informed by experience.
Blogger Howard said...
"The "I think I can" philosophy is liberal. It's why conservatives men are marginally more successful than Women in the arts, inventions, sciences and cutting edge technology. Notice I didn't mention engineering. Jordan Peterson 101. Traits openness and extraversion."
How many patents in your name?
Fairy tales are important to children. A fairy tale puts them in charge of adults and their seemingly arbitrary commands.
Ed Koch said that if you say you can’t do it, you’re right; you can’t do it. But somebody else with a better attitude can.
"Sounds like time to deploy TR once more"
Or Judge Smails:
It's easy to grin
When your ship comes in
And you've got the stock market beat.
But the man worthwhile,
Is the man who can smile,
When his shorts are too tight in the seat.
C.K.Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning
"Very much poetry consists of statements, symbolic arrangements capable of truth or falsity, which are used not for the sake of their truth or falsity but for the sake of the attitudes which their acceptance will evoke. For this purpose it frequently happens, or rather it is part of the poet's business to make it happen, that the truth or falsity matters not at all to the acceptance."
As in, Empson comments, the lie that the mistress is perfect. The interesting case is negative attitudes which are plainly false
A.E.Housman the nettle poem
Their seed the sowers scatter
Behind them as they go.
Poor lads, ’tis little matter
How many sorts they sow,
For only one will grow.
The charlock on the fallow
Will take the traveller’s eyes,
And gild the ploughland sallow
With flowers before it dies,
But twice ’twill not arise.
The stinging-nettle only
Will still be found to stand:
The numberless, the lonely,
The filler of the land,
The leaf that hurts the hand.
It thrives, come sun, come showers;
Blow east, blow west, it springs;
It peoples towns, and towers
About the courts of Kings,
And touch it and it stings.
"It's why conservatives men are marginally more successful than Women in the arts, inventions, sciences and cutting edge technology."
Marginally? What planet do you live on?
Liberals have to turn to Netflix to slobber over a TV show that has a woman beating the world chess champion...only in fiction.
"to convince kids they can achieve Lefty Nivara if they grift well and believe in the welfare state that takes from producers & achievers and gives to them"
Heather MacDonald just eviscerated the fallacy of "systemic racism" in City Journal. Nothing we don't know already, but here it is.
How long til she is canceled?
Wow, Silverstein really was a shit. Way to encourage kids that trying only leads to failure, so don't bother trying.
The follow on story was also a dozy, "The little train that couldn't cause it was never built". It was expected to sell big but he never wrote it.
THINKING you can just ain't enough!
Nevertheless, she persisted.
Dolly Parton's Imagination Library sends free kids' books, one per month, age appropriate to any who ask. I think the number's up to about fifty million now.
Its funded in part by her dinner theater enterprises.
I’m not convinced that “The Little Engine that Could” is a right wing book. When Yoda says “Do, or do not, there is no try”, that makes Ayn Rand look like a Pansy.
Hadn't you heard? The 'Rebels' were really the bad guys.
Jeff Brokaw said...
"That ending sucks, Shel.
Stories aren’t supposed to be realistic or set our expectations appropriately. Stories are to inspire us and empower us with belief.
Ever heard of affirmations, Shel? Probably not. Too positive and empowering for a guy like you."
Exactly. It's as though Silverstein is saying, in the Collective voice, 'We think you can't."
"Exactly. It's as though Silverstein is saying, in the Collective voice, 'We think you can't.""
More like "Don't even think of trying, or bettering yourself. A nice quiet mediocrity is all you should be."
Regarding the antipathy toward Dolly Parton, the flip side of 'Celebrate Perverdity' is 'Derogate Normality.'
Where's autocorrect when you really need it?
More like "Don't even think of trying, or bettering yourself. A nice quiet mediocrity is all you should be."
Well, that does help the other mediocracies to feel good about themselves. And what's more important than ensuring that a bunch of ordinary do-nothings are never exposed to the idea that they might be able do better if they tried?
You force serendipity. You do the human thing of looking for, and finding, patterns where there are no patterns.
Just one granted patent, Rusty. In chemical engineering even though I'm a hydrogeologist. Heavy industry hot rodding over several years at multiple active plants to flesh out the final designs and applications.
That's a beautiful thought, Nichevo.
"Heavy industry hot rodding"
One of the best Pornhub channels.
You can't beat a girl in stripper heels carrying a socket wrench.
I am Laslo.
"No Point du Hoc for them."
I agree with Richard Spencer and Althouse as it were, the GOP is weak and pathetic. Better to pick the stronger horse with a bigger, flashier tribe, as it were.
This is no time to depend on justice. Know they need that cover to rape and pillage and repatriate some more stuff too.
Knowing what I know of Japan, I am still glad we won WW11.
"You can't beat a girl in stripper heels carrying a socket wrench."
I guess it's considered 'carrying,' technically speaking.
Hey, Silverstein was trying to do a funny like WC Fields famous quote and it didn't quite work. It happens.
I can still forgive a lot to the guy who wrote "A Boy Named Sue".
I am Irene Garcia, a Corporate Sales Specialist operating in the Latin American region. We are experts in Market Research (Mercado Latinoamericano del Tabaco ). We provide market reports across various industry verticals and also help with procurement and supply chain intelligence. By giving you better insights, we help you make informed business decisions.
Nichevo said...
"You force serendipity. You do the human thing of looking for, and finding, patterns where there are no patterns."
But a rational person recognizes when there is no pattern. The difference between emotion and reason.
I think I can. I think I can....
except those deplorables keep holding me back with that damned invisible systemic racism.
Oh well, why try.
I've been reading this blog for about ten years. Haven't figured out this Ann Althouse chick yet. I think maybe she wanted to create a forum for Liberal thinkers to congregate and talk about important things. I don't know if she's figured it out yet, but she got what she wanted. I dig this girl.
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