Who breaks up with you by telegram?

I'm reading "50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’/The singer-songwriter questioned everything on her fourth album. Twenty-five musicians speak about the LP’s enduring power on its 50th anniversary" (NYT), and there's this, from Graham Nash:

Obviously there are a couple of songs on the record that I recognize, from when she would write them in the house, that involved me. “My Old Man,” “River.” She finished the album after we parted, but for many months I saw her there writing this stuff. It was a fascinating process to see, I must confess. It’s as if she tore her skin off and just released all her nerves into music. I was repairing the house in Laurel Canyon, I was actually laying the kitchen floor when I got a telegram from Joan saying that our affair was over, officially. And she put it in a very interesting way. She said, “If you squeeze sand in your hand, it will run through your fingers.” I thought, got it. And that was it.

When was the age of telegraphy? I'm 70 years old, and I've never sent or received a telegram. I remember telegrams only as a way of communicating that someone had died. Maybe there's some poetry in using a telegram to convey the information that the relationship has died.

"Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties/The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake."

Writes Matt Taibbi (at taibbi.substack.com):

Whatever one’s opinion of [Michael] Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks....

The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.... Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran....

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....

Much more at the link. Well done.

Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent." Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers? That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth! And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.

Joni had to go out for the flowers to put in the vase that she bought, so Graham got a chance at the piano.